The Mississippi Basin Model - 1975 Booklet

Dear Readers,

I have written about the famous US Army Corps of Engineers Mississippi Basin Model before. If you click on the link and scroll to the bottom of the article, you will see links to older posts. The City of Jackson neglected the model for over a decade. But the Friends of Mississippi River Basin Model (Facebook: @FriendsofMississippiRiverBasinModel) are now cleaning the trees and debris at the site in Buddy Butts Park in Jackson. 

Aerial view of the Mississippi Basin Model with red outline showing area that has been cleared and cleaned as of June, 2018 (from Friends of the Mississippi River Basin Model).

For more information on the design, purpose, and background, the Waterways Experiment Station prepared a booklet that described the Basin Model. The booklet is a .pdf file that the link will open. It is well-written and illustrated; please take time to read it.

The Mississippi Basin Model Update 2017: Some Tender Loving Care

The US Army Corps of Engineers' (USACE) Mississippi Basin Model, in Buddy Butts Park, Jackson, is finally receiving some tender loving care from the The Friends of the Mississippi River Basin Model. Volunteers are clearing away trees, underbrush, and jungle. The City of Jackson provides dumpster trucks to haul away the trees and material that the volunteers drag out to the road. It is a major effort considering the decades that the site was neglected. Eventually, The friends will post interpretive signs and will offer educational programs.

Coverage of the Mississippi Basin Model. From the USACE, undated.

The Basin Model was the largest hydraulic model of a waterway ever constructed. Its purpose was to model the flow of the Mississippi River, learn how the river responded, and predict engineering modifications, such as changes to levees or overflow features.

Most of the buildings are in poor condition and have been looted of any remaining instruments or technical equipment. Some of the roofs have collapsed.

This catwalk goes over an impressive sump. The brick building in the back housed pumps. I think some of the pumps refilled a water tower, whose purpose may have been to provide constant pressure water to various manifolds, which in turn directed water to specific sections of the model.

A couple of corrugated utility buildings are standing, but some of the wood structures have collapsed.

Poison ivy has taken over. I need to be especially careful when I help out on the clean-up days.

Some earlier articles about the Basin Model (click to see the articles):

https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2010/01/mississippi-river-basin-model-jackson.html
https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2010/07/update-on-mississippi-basin-model-in.html
https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2010/12/update-mississippi-basin-model-further.html
https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2013/01/mississippi-basin-model-construction.html
https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2015/11/mississippi-river-basin-model.html

These photographs are on Kodak TMax 100 film, exposed at ISO 80 and developed by Praus Productions in XTOL developer. I used a compact Olympus Trip 35 camera, a tiny thing with a selenium photocell exposure metering system and an excellent 40mm f/2.8 Tessar-type lens.

Photographing Decay with the Olympus Trip 35 (Good Things in Tiny Packages)

The Olympus Trip 35 is a compact 24×36mm-format point-and-shoot camera that was sold in the millions in the 1970s and 1980s. The specifications are pretty modest, but it takes amazingly good photographs when you use fine grain film. With the recent revival in film photography, the Trip 35 has become somewhat of a cult classic because it is compact, has a precision feel (like most Olympus cameras), and is fun to use. Prices range from about $30 to over $100, depending on condition. Sure, it is no Leica, but for many situations, the negatives from this Olympus are highly satisfying.

As you can see, this is a simple device. Film winding is via a wheel on the back. Exposure is automatic, controlled by a selenium meter that is coupled to the aperture and shutter. If the light is too low, a red flag pops up in the finder to tell you that the shutter button is locked.

The 40mm ƒ/2.8 lens consists of 4 elements in 3 groups, so it is probably a Tessar-type optic. Tessars have been in use for a century. Because of the limited number of glass-air surfaces, they are resistant to flare and are contrasty. And they have a characteristic that is sometimes called edge effect, where density builds up at abrupt feature edges on the negative. This gives the appearance of enhanced sharpness. Wide open, at ƒ/2.8, the sides of a frame are not too sharp, but stopped down, the scene is uniformly crisp (examples below). The lens is not as well corrected as a 6- or 7-element Sonnar- or Summicron-type lens, but those are much more expensive and complicated designs.

This Olympus lens is front-element focussing, meaning only the front part moves. My Voigtländer Vito BL camera has a unit focussing Color-Skopar lens, meaning the entire lens moves back and forth to focus. The Vito is definitely better optically than the Olympus, but that may be specific to my cameras. Many people have excellent results with element focussing Tessar-design lenses.

This little Olympus has limitations:

1. There are only two shutter speeds: 1/40 sec and 1/200 sec. The camera sets them for you based on the amount of light, but if you turn the aperture dial off "A" to one of the f-stops, the shutter is 1/40.
2. The light meter, being a selenium cell, does not have low-light capacity. The selenium cell (behind the bubbly plastic) surrounds the lens. If you want a low-light camera, you need one with a battery-powered CDS or SBC cell.
3. The viewfinder does not have a focus aide, so you need to estimate the distance. The lens has some symbols to help you, such as a mountain or a person. Really, it is not difficult. Millions of photographers in the 1970s and 1980s successfully used the little Rollei 35 cameras with their zone focus lenses.
4. The filter size is a unique 43.5mm fine pitch. Why did Olympus do this? Filters are very hard to find, and they do not screw in easily.
5. For some unknown reason, hoods are rare in the USA. I had to order one from a UK vendor, and it cost as much as the camera did.

Regardless of these limitations, this Olympus is fun. I always used manual cameras, where I set aperture, shutter speed, and focus myself. With this little Trip 35, you can leave the focus at infinity (the mountain symbol), raise the camera to frame, and snap away.  It is so simple, so liberating. But I noticed I still carry it in the same way as my bigger cameras: left hand cradling the lens and right hand holding the right side and index finger on the shutter button. Solid grip, no breathing, and careful press.

11th Street (Route 66), Tulsa, Oklahoma

Route 66, Canute, Oklahoma

Here are two examples of Trip 35 photos taken on Kodak BW400CN film in bright sunny conditions. I used a polarizing filter to darken the sky.

Gray Street (Route 66), McLean, Texas

The lens has some barrel distortion, as shown by the curved sidewalk in the picture of the historic Phillips 66 gasoline station in McLean, Texas. Software could correct it, but I left it just as scanned.

Warehouse, Mississippi Basin Model, Jackson, Mississippi

Pump house, Mississippi Basin Model, Jackson

The long-neglected hydraulic model of the Mississippi River basin in Buddy Butts Park, Jackson, is finally being cleaned by the Friends of Mississippi River Basin Model volunteer group. The buildings are good examples of texture, patterns, and shapes. Here I used TMax 100 film under contrasty conditions. Again, no complaints about this Olympus lens!

Country store, Hwy 457 east of Pattison, Mississippi.

At low light, you can see the limitations of this Olympus. The picture of an old country store near Pattison was low contrast with some flare around the tree branches. The shutter speed would have been 1/40 sec and probably close to ƒ/2.8. Good, but not Leica quality. Still, I will test the Trip 35 some more to learn its limitations, and I have not yet tried color negative film. Its tiny size makes it a good travel camera if you need to pack light. If any of you readers want to experiment with film photography, a Trip 35 or one of the other compact Japanese rangefinder cameras from the 1970s or 1980s is an inexpensive way to get started. Write me and I will be glad to help.

For more information, the 35MMC blog reviewed the Trip 35 as well as many other compact cameras of the 1970s and 1980s. A blog by Peter Vis has a description of a tear-down.

This is the tenth article in my irregular series on tools for photographing decay. Previous articles (click the links):

Decay with the Leica camera
Decay with the Rolleiflex TLR camera
The Leica IIIC camera
Kodak Panatomix-X film
Fomapan 100 Classic film
The 35mm Super Takumar lens
Decline of an industrial giant: Eastman Kodak
Ilford XP-2 film
Kodak Ektar 25 film

Mississippi River Basin Model - continuing decay, November 2015

The former U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Mississippi Basin Model in Buddy Butts Park in Jackson, Mississippi, remains abandoned and neglected by the City of Jackson. As you might expect, the site is more and more overgrown and vandalized than ever. On this visit, my friends and I explored some of the buildings, which are gradually collapsing.

The first building, next to the water tower, was a pump house partly built over a sump. The catwalk is still intact despite the roof collapsing.

 A steel shed once contained air compressors and other machinery of unknown purpose.

This building once contained the Stevens chart recorders and may have been an executive control center for the model. I showed photographs of the old Stevens recorders in my 2010 article, but all have disappeared now.

These shelves once contained rolls of paper with holes representing some sort of coding (octal?). The flow of water via electrical or pneumatically-actuated valves was controlled by these paper strip charts.

This is one of the inflow controllers. I wish it was intact and wish I knew how it worked.

My friends and I came across another building that we had not explored before.

This building contained the remains of two huge air compressors. I am still not sure exactly how the compressed air was used, but it had something to do with the pneumatic controllers and the chart strip recorders.

This viewing platform was once used by tourists who visited the site. In the 1960s, the Basin Model was a popular tourist attraction (as was the Waterways Experiment Station before 9/11). I have read that many of the former German prisoners of war who worked on the site in World War II came to see the functioning model.

The model is a peaceful place on a quiet Autumn afternoon. Visit it soon before the buildings and concrete terrain elements are completely overgrown.

For some earlier articles, please click the links:

2010

2010 July

2010 December

2013

Photographs taken with a Fujifilm X-E1 digital camera with a Fujinon 27mm f/2.8 lens. Raw files processed in PhotoNinja software.

UPDATE JULY 2017:  A volunteer organization has been formed to clean and clear the site and develop it as an education/interpretive center. Readers interested in participating in the cleanup work, please contact: 

Sarah McEwen

President, Friends of the Mississippi River Basin Model

601-376-9131

Twitter: @MSRiverBasinMod

Facebook: @FriendsofMississippiRiverBasin Model

Mississippi Basin Model construction and instruments

Regular readers may remember my earlier posts about the Mississippi Basin Model from early 2010, July 2010, and Dec. 2010. This was the most comprehensive hydraulic model ever built, meaning it covered the largest land extent of any model. The Corps of Engineers also built a Chesapeake Bay Model and one of San Francisco Bay. The Chesapeake model only had a full operational life of three years and is now gone.  But the San Francisco model still exists and is open to visitors in a warehouse in Sausalito.

Building a model like this is a complex project requiring precise scaling and ultra-precise shaping of the terrain. I found some photographs that help explain how a scale physical hydraulic model like this is constructed.

In the first photograph, metal templates that show the topography have been laid out across the soil at specified intervals. The templates usually have vertical exaggeration, such as 1:10, meaning vertical distance is scaled 10 times greater than the horizontal scale. Then the soil is moved and shaped to approximately match the templates.

At the Mississippi Basin Model, the original earth work, excavating canals, and installing piping was performed by German prisoners of war.  The Germans were repatriated in 1946, and civilian employees completed the rest of the model.  The template method of shaping the terrain was used between 1946 and approximately 1953. But the expansive soil in the area required a shift to the contour method of construction (not shown in these photographs).

In the second photograph, the workers are carefully pouring concrete and shaping the surface to exactly match the top of the templates. This is painstaking work requiring years of experience. The labor, time, and space requirements underscore why building physical models is so expensive.

This is an electronic water-level follower, meaning an instrument to measure water level. Notice that electronic circuits means vacuum tubes!

Finally, here is one of the Stevens chart recorders that plots the water level over time. As the paper drum turns, an ink pens moves up and down on the guide rails.

This is a January, 2010, photograph of one of the controls rooms at the Basin Model. Since then, all the Stevens recorders have been removed, probably stolen.

Historical black and white photographs courtesy of the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, Engineer Research and Development Center, US Army Corps of Engineers.

Update: Mississippi Basin Model - Further Decline

Dear Readers, bad news: what is left of the famous Mississippi Basin hydraulic model in Jackson (in Butts Park off McRaven Street) has deteriorated noticeably in the last year.

This was the largest hydraulic model in the world, meaning it covered the largest continental land area ever to be assembled into one comprehensive tool to test water flows. It was last used during the 1973 Mississippi River flood when the Old River Control Structure was almost undermined. The structure's failure would have led to a large proportion of the river's flow going down the Atchafalaya River waterway rather then along the present path past Baton Rouge and New Orleans and on to the Balize Delta. The model was maintained through the 1970s but finally discontinued because of the expensive manpower requirements. The land was deeded to the Department of the Interior and subsequently to the City of Jackson in the early 1990s. Since then, trees and brush have covered much of the site, buildings have fallen down, and vandals have damaged equipment and stolen property.
You can get an idea of the vast size of this operation from the photograph above. This is part of the lower Mississippi below Vicksburg. The accordion-folded mesh serves as friction to simulate trees (hardwood bottom land) in the delta plain. This area is not as overgrown as other areas because of the broad expanse of concrete.
One of the compressor houses still has its roof, and the equipment inside is still present. Another one-story building on the site has completely collapsed. Another one suffered a fire so intense that the steel roof joists warped.
In the lower-river control house, a number of the Stevens chart recorders have been stolen since last January. These machines provided a permanent record of a flood in the form of stage hydrographs. They recorded on chart paper with pens, similar to tide recorders and just about every other type of technical data recorder in the mid-20th century.
The punched paper you see above was for the flow controller system. This controlled a variety of orifices in the flow controller tank, which in turn released precisely measured amounts of water to the model. The charts could be played back many times to rerun particular flow events or storms. A coworker told me that at one time, many bookcases were filled with these paper rolls. Fascinating technology, but I can imagine the manpower required.

You can see more photographs of the site in this January 2010 blog entry: Basin Model. If you want to see what is left, visit soon. The deterioration appears to be accelerating. It's really sad to let this historic civil engineering wonder go.

UPDATE JULY 2017:  A volunteer organization has been formed to clean and clear the site and develop it as an education/interpretive center. They have already done amazing work at clearing trees and cleaning off some of the concrete walkways. Readers interested in participating in the cleanup work, please contact: 

Sarah McEwen

President, Friends of the Mississippi River Basin Model

601-376-9131

Twitter: @MSRiverBasinMod

Facebook: @FriendsofMississippiRiverBasin Model

Update on the Mississippi Basin Model in Jackson, Mississippi

July 31, 2010 update: A coworker sent me a scan of this wonderful postcard from, I am guessing, the early 1960s, showing tourists or engineers examining the Mississippi Basin Model. They are standing at the Vicksburg harbor project. Close to the camera, you can see the old Hwy US 80 bridge where it crosses the river from Vicksburg to Delta, Louisiana. The Interstate 20 bridge has not yet been built.

How times have changed: the gent is wearing a necktie and the ladies are elegantly dressed. In 50 years, we have become a nation of swine.

Sections of the model might be recovered and moved to Vicksburg to become a part of the new transportation museum. The museum will be on Washington Street near the old Levee Street Depot. I do not know if water will be run through the model; that would be a fantastic way to demonstrate the technology of a physical model.

July 2015 update: None of this old model was reused. It continues to languish and decay. Much of the remaining machinery has been looted.