There's an illegal immigrant cruising its way up the Mississippi River. The Asian carp — a common name for a few separate but similar species of carp — was imported into the U.S. by Midwestern fish farmers in the 1970s. The fish fit perfectly into their native Chinese and Vietnamese habitats, where they've been raised in rice fields for more than 1,000 years. But in the U.S., floods allowed Asian carp to escape into the wild, where ...

On Monday, May 16, Chris Epps, commissioner of Mississippi's department of corrections, sat at a long conference table, grasping a mound of financial documents. He was preparing to head to the state's penitentiary, an 18,000-acre old cotton farm in the Mississippi River Delta, for the execution of a man convicted of murder nearly two decades ago. Since the mid-1990s, Mississippi has become one of America's most aggressive incarcerators — a difficult feat, in a nation of jailers. ...

New Orleans is having a bad case of nerves. The Mississippi River has flooded catastrophically upstream and its swelling waters are moving inexorably down toward the Big Easy — and its traumatic memories of recent disasters, Katrina and the Gulf oil spill. "We're in a weird situation," observes Linda Jackson, an activist in the Lower Ninth Ward. Her district is particularly anxious: the neighborhood has two functioning bridges from which people can see the swelling Mississippi. The ...

It seemed, on the face of things, to make sense: The first gate of the Morganza Spillway opened on Saturday afternoon, sending 10,000 cubic feet of Mississippi River water churning south toward the Atchafalaya Basin, all part of a concerted effort to help relieve pressure on burdened levees protecting Baton Rouge and New Orleans. By late Sunday morning, a total of four had been opened. But Bayou residents can be forgiven for wondering just how well-conceived the Army ...

Think you have a head for heights? The Capilano Cliffwalk will make you think again. Opening on June 2, it's suspended 70 m over a rushing river with some sections projecting 9 m away from a mossy, fern-covered granite cliff. Located in the forested hills just minutes from downtown Vancouver, the Capilano Suspension Bridge park already boasts the eponymous 137-m-long bridge. But after rappelling down the canyon one day, John Stibbard, third-generation park manager, found inspiration for a ...

Mark Twain, the bard of the Mississippi River, was always skeptical of human efforts to control it. "Ten thousand river commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, 'Go here,' or 'Go there,' and make it obey," he wrote in 1883. Twain genuinely admired "the West Point engineers" who dreamed of caging the beast. He truly wanted to believe their ...

The warning couldn't have been clearer. Libya's water supply network, a multi-billion dollar project that pipes clean water from underground reserves in the south to some 4.5 million residents along the coast, is at risk. If an airstrike hits one of the 3,000 manholes along the pipeline, says Abdul Majid Qa'oud, agricultural minister and chairman of the Great Manmade River People's Committee, the whole system would break down. "It will be a humanitarian disaster," he says. That ...

Buildings may topple and lives may be lost if the Big One shakes the wrong part of California but another catastrophic consequence of an enormous earthquake in the San Francisco area may involve water. Two thirds of the state's drinking water supply flows through the gigantic Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta region east of San Francisco Bay — and the levees that help direct the massive amounts of water south to farmlands and cities are so antiquated that many may ...

Months before flood season begins in western Washington, government officials have already declared a state of emergency and, even as they worry about the viability of a pivotal dam, have encouraged residents to buy flood insurance immediately. When the Howard Hanson Dam was first built on the Green River in western Washington in 1962, the concrete behemoth was hailed as the new protector of the valley below. Until that point, the Green River Valley was regularly inundated during ...

A security incident Friday on the Potomac River was prompted by a training exercise, two sources in the Washington police department said the Coast Guard told them.