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 The
tale of what happens to the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in a
great earthquake on the New Madrid Fault is found in Book 2,
Broken River.
When a great earthquake strikes
on the New Madrid, it inflicts the most damage upon man-made
structures in its vicinity. Two hundred years ago those structures
consisted of log cabins and a few tents. The river was wild and
free roaming with only a few log-boats floating down, drifting
in its current.
Today the rivers are themselves
man-made structures, reformed by the Army Corps of Engineers
and the Mississippi Levee Authority. Levees and revetments line
their sides, weirs control their flow, locks control their traffic,
and dams form lakes where there once were valleys. The rivers
have become a great transportation system. They are now a structure
that can be broken, and broken catastrophically.
Captain BuddyJoe Simpson pilots
the towboat LadyBird Jamison with twelve barges of grain
downriver past Caruthersville when the earth begins to shake.
The Bella Queen excursion boat and its one hundred plus
passengers are just departing the dock at Caruthersville with
Captain Barney Ruggs at the helm. Both boats hold in the middle
of the river where the water protects them from the hard shaking,
but others along the river are not so fortunate.
Virgil watches the Interstate-255
bridge fall into the flooded waters of the Mississippi. Charlie
and Sylvie Greene watch the 250 foot bluffs of Fort Pillow sluff
into the river, creating a twenty-foot high seiche, a wave of
water, that charges up the river to engulf Osceola. Freddy and
Paula, her labor induced by the trauma of the shaking, seek shelter
on an empty barge from the instant quicksand produced by the
vibrations near Cairo at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi.
Loretta watches the revetments protecting Caruthersville sink
and water begin to flow into the town.
To the northeast, Everett watches
the destruction of the Kentucky Dam and its barge locks, releasing
a fifty-million cubic feet per second flow that will continue
for weeks, enough to raise the already flooded Mississippi by
six feet and more when the flood reaches Caruthersville.
When the shaking ends, Barney
tries to move his excursion boat down river and his boat snags
the remains of the I-255 bridge. BuddyJoe must find some way
to save the Bella Queen from the impending flood. Later BuddyJoe
hears over the river radio that Bessie's Neck has been broken,
and the Mississippi has changed its course, creating a mile and
a half wide, ten-foot high waterfall.
After saving the disabled Bella
Queen from the flood, BuddyJoe guides a mix of refugees downriver
towards Memphis. He must avoid the multitude of crevasses created
by the fallen levees, fight with the river pirates spawned in
the anarchy on the riverbanks, and shoot the rapids created by
the underwater dam formed from the Fort Pillow bluffs.
When the flotilla arrives in
Memphis and BuddyJoe ties up to the bank, the passengers all
thank him, but he realizes that those on the boats were far better
off on the water than they will be on dry land. Now he must find
a way to help those in the lost city.
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