Mississippi in Mississippi

In rolling country near Jackson, Miss., 1,500 German prisoners of war were busy with pick & shovel. They heaped big mounds of earth, dug trenches and excavations that looked like foxholes. They were building perhaps the biggest topographical map ever made. When finished, it will be a mile-long concrete model of the Mississippi Valley, complete with tributaries, hills and mountains, stretching from Pittsburgh to Denver, from Minneapolis to New Orleans. Object: a laboratory to study flood control.

The $9,000,000 project, conceived by U.S. Army engineers, will be more than four times as big as a similar model of the Lower Mississippi at Vicksburg (TIME, March 2, 1942). Into the model's concrete-molded river beds and 150 reservoirs, duplicating those already built or proposed in the Valley itself, engineers will be able to pour a flood of 900 gallons of water a minute, regulating the flow and water stages in any part of the system by means of 1,500 gauges operated from a central control board.

To Dam or Not To Dam? Since 1927 the U.S. Government has spent well over a billion dollars and states have spent hundreds of millions more on dams, levees and river channel dredging. But it has all been of doubtful avail: last spring one of the most destructive floods in U.S. history devastated parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma. Many engineers and soil conservationists now believe that the attempt to control the Mississippi and tributaries by big dams is futile. They favor stopping floods at their source by means of many small catch basins in the feeder streams. Because the Jackson model includes all the sources of the Mississippi instead of only the lower part of the Valley, the Army's engineers hope it will point the way to more effective flood control.

The model is a huge job in itself. It covers 200 acres, will take two or three years to build. Most of the basic labor will be by German prisoners from nearby Camp Clinton. The whole project will be topped off with a perimeter road from which postwar tourists may see the model in operation.

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