Reddit reviews Reining in the Rio Grande: People, Land, and Water
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They aren't exactly for erosion control, flood protection, advancing amphibious armies or catching debris - but tangentially they kind of are. The main goal of the jetty jack project was river channelization and bank protection.
The Rio Grande comes out of the mountains north of here and spreads out into the relatively flat area of Albuquerque as it finds its way down to Las Cruces. This loss of gradient means that the river loses velocity/energy and drops its sediment. With its sediment load kind of in its own way, the river continuously has to meander widely back and forth across the valley to move south.
In the early days of settlement, the valley was swampy because of this meandering pattern of the river. The floods would come through and if your fields were in the path of the new floodplain, well, you were flooded. And if you were on the banks and the river happened to scour out your fields, well that just sucks.
So to address some of these issues (in addition with projects by the MRGCD and other flood control agencies), the 'Kellner Jack' system was put in place to tack the river down. Tacking the river down is key here -- they wanted to reign in the river and get it to conform to a more predictable pattern. These jacks were installed by the hundreds of thousands at key locations to slow the water enough so that it would drop sediment and bury the jack field, bringing the banks closer together. With this, there was no more meandering and the river would run a relatively straight shot through the middle valley, protecting lands on the banks for agriculture, and improving the routing efficiency of floods.
These were massively effective at channelization and I *think the reason we have a bosque there today, although there has been a slough of unintended consequences. Kathy Grassel wrote a really good paper on them (linked below) that goes into more detail on the history and possibility of removal and restoration activities. Also is the book, Reining in the Rio Grande, another good source of info on the broader topic of the Rio
Kathy Grassel's paper
https://www.fws.gov/bhg/Literature/Jetty%20Jacks%20pub%20version.pdf
Reigning in the Rio Grande
https://www.amazon.com/Reining-Rio-Grande-People-Water/dp/0826349439