A River's Life

 Bonnet Carré Spillway, Mississippi River, St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, 2012

Wired features photos of the French Broad River, the Tennessee and now the Mississippi River by Jeff Rich:

Back in the 1950s, the French Broad was one of the most polluted rivers in the country. Heavy industry nears its shores, erosion due to deforestation and nearby urban areas had not been kind. Things got better in the 1970s thanks to the passage of the Clean Water Act, but Rich says the river is still under threat.
Carson pointed him to the most polluted sites along the French Broad and its tributaries. Rich made photos of buildings along the shores like paper mills and cement plants. From there, he started to think more locally and tried to meet people who depended on the river or the tributaries for their livelihood and people who used the rivers for recreation. Over time the project became an ethnographic study of both the French Broad and the people around it.
After four years of documenting the French Broad, Rush thought he was done photographing water. But then the dike at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County ruptured and spilled 1.1 billion gallons of coal fly ash slurry into the surrounding area, including several rivers that flow into the Tennessee. Rich photographed the event and he eventually decided to expand and start documenting the Tennessee river.
“It was the logical next step to keep going down the river,” Rich says. “And the Tennessee is a completely different body of water so it would create a different body of work.”

For more on the Bonnet Carre Spillway, go here and here.  For more on the TVA, go here.