Ohio River Report #156, Today is Monday, March 31, 2014. 🌟On March 31, 1889, the Eiffel Tower is dedicated in Paris in a ceremony presided over by Gustave Eiffel, the towers designer, and attended by French Prime Minister Pierre Tirard, a handful of other dignitaries, and 200 construction workers. In 1889, to honor of the centenary of the French Revolution, the French government planned an international exposition and announced a design competition for a monument to be built on the Champ-de-Mars in central Paris. Out of more than 100 designs submitted, the Centennial Committee chose Eiffels plan of an open-lattice wrought-iron tower that would reach almost 1,000 feet above Paris and be the worlds tallest man-made structure. Eiffel, a noted bridge builder, was a master of metal construction and designed the framework of the Statue of Liberty that had recently been erected in New York Harbor. The Eiffel Tower remained the worlds tallest man-made structure until the completion of the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930. Incredibly, the Eiffel Tower was almost demolished when the International Expositions 20-year lease on the land expired in 1909, but its value as an antenna for radio transmission saved it. It remains largely unchanged today and is one of the worlds premier tourist attractions. 🌟In 1973, The Mississippi River reaches its peak level in St. Louis during a record 77-day flood. During the extended flood, 33 people died and more than $1 billion in damages were incurred. The roots of the 1973 flood go back to October 1972, when above-average rain began falling in the river basins that feed the Mississippi River. With more precipitation than normal coming down through the winter, the stage was set for flooding when hard rain came down in March. With most of the Midwest already saturated, the Mississippi began rising slowly to flood levels. By the middle of March, flood waters began inundating some communities along the Mississippi. The worst of it came in early April when 6 million acres south of St. Louis, Missouri, were claimed by the river and many levees crumbled and failed. As they moved downstream, the rising waters threatened the city of New Orleans. Officials decided to divert some of the water to Lake Ponchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico. This ended the threat to New Orleans, but came at the expense of hundreds of farms in the area. In some areas, the floods continued until June. Floods of this type are not typically as deadly as flash floods because there is sufficient warning and time to evacuate flood regions. Those who died in this instance were largely residents who had resisted evacuation orders. Still, the flood devastated the economy of the region, as very few families had flood insurance and millions of acres of farm land were unusable for a full year following the flood.🌟In 1991, after 36 years in existence, the Warsaw Pact—the military alliance between the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites—comes to an end. The action was yet another sign that the Soviet Union was losing control over its former allies and that the Cold War was falling apart. The Warsaw Pact was formed in 1955, primarily as a response to the decision by the United States and its western European allies to include a rearmed West Germany in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO had begun in 1949 as a defensive military alliance between the United States, Canada, and several European nations to thwart possible Soviet expansion into Western Europe. In 1954, NATO nations voted to allow a rearmed West Germany into the organization. The Soviets responded with the establishment of the Warsaw Pact. The original members included the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Albania. Although the Soviets claimed that the organization was a defensive alliance, it soon became clear that the primary purpose of the pact was to reinforce communist dominance in Eastern Europe. In Hungary in 1956, and then again in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviets invoked the pact to legitimize its interventions in squelching anticommunist revolutions. By the late-1980s, however, anti-Soviet and anticommunist movements throughout Eastern Europe began to crack the Warsaw Pact. In 1990, East Germany left the Warsaw Pact in preparation for its reunification with West Germany. Poland and Czechoslovakia also indicated their strong desire to withdraw. Faced with these protests—and suffering from a faltering economy and unstable political situation—the Soviet Union bowed to the inevitable. In March 1991, Soviet military commanders relinquished their control of Warsaw Pact forces. A few months later, the pacts Political Consultative Committee met for one final time and formally recognized what had already effectively occurred—the Warsaw Pact was no more. The time is 6:06 AM our temperature right now is 29° heading to a high of 61°. Winds are registering in at 2-3 mph from the NNW. Humidity is 75% with visibility at 5 miles. The barometer is showing 30.16. Pollen count is currently 4.30 out of 12.00. Sunshine is the word today! Its about time! -with Roy Clouston
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 10:17:10 +0000
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