Missouri Ozark Plateau Headwaters Diversion engineering feat

Abstract

T he Headwaters Diversion, a system of impounding basins, channels, and levees, carries the waters of the eastern Missouri Ozark Plateau hill streams eastward to the Mississippi River south of Cape Girardeau (figure 1). The system consists of three large basins, 78 km (50.3 mi) of channels, and 69 km (44.7 mi) of levees designed in 1910s by the Little River Drainage District (LRDD) to divert and temporarily store ordinary and flood waters running off 288,000 ha (720,000 ac) of the Francois Mountains and Ozark Plateau uplands (Burns 1919; Engineering Record 1914; LRDD 2012). Today, the Headwaters Diversion helps drain and protect 480,000 ha (1.2 million ac) of agricultural lands in southeast Missouri from internal seasonal flooding and Mississippi River backflow at flood stage (figure 1). It was constructed concurrently with an intricate network of 1,500 km (957 mi) of ditches, 375 km (242 mi) of levees, and water detention basins draining thousands of alluvial wetland hectares (acres) in the ancient Mississippi River floodplain running south from the diversion levee 144 km (90 mi) to the Arkansas border and is the focus of an upcoming article in the March/April 2016 issue of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation (Olson et…