Unleashing the Mississippi River.

I struggle with doing this under the guise of turning it back to it’s “natural” state. That ship sailed when the built the locks in 1963 and unless you continue to remove them downstream the river will never be natural again.

I agree with Dutch that this will take years to sort out if it ever does get done. But, the only part of the river that will be close to “natural” will be from Coon Rapids to St Paul. If LD 3 is used to keep a navigation channel open through St Paul to the MN River you only get a handful of miles that are natural. Do they go so far as to remove all of the wing dams, too?

I’m not sure how I feel about all of this because there are more questions than answers at this point.

Would be interesting to see some photos or map of the river before the locks were in place. Kinda see whats coming before it happens.

I also wonder what kind of protests took place to stop those locks from being built in the first place?

Kettle falls dam is the biggest, recent dam removal project I remember. Seems there has been many smaller dams removed in mn in recent years. Here is a photo of the destruction left behind after the kettle falls dam was removed. Doesnt look to bad to me.

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/06/08/photos-historical-st-anthony-falls

Okay. From those photos the river was looking all that fantastic before the dams where built. Sure not anything close to a natural state.

The high water photos were taken in the spring and the low water photos in OCT. Which only makes sense.

Maybe if they push hard enough to bring it back to it’s natural state maybe they will be getting rid of all the hipster condos and businesses then. Make it like parts of the rum and Croix where there are strict set backs with natural buffers and very limited view.

dbright wrote:

Maybe if they push hard enough to bring it back to it’s natural state maybe they will be getting rid of all the hipster condos and businesses then. Make it like parts of the rum and Croix where there are strict set backs with natural buffers and very limited view.

My guess is that will be the standard, but only for the portion between the U of MN and Ford Bridge that’s already essentially undeveloped shoreline.