The other problem is that it is likely to be more vulnerable to floods.

The main drawback of a house in such a location isn't that it is appreciably hotter or swampier than a house in any other neighborhood of a city built on a vast floodplain, but that it is considerably noisier when the dredge is in operation. I wouldn't assume that any habitation 'out by the dredge' is necessarily impoverished and ramshackle, though it certainly might be. It wouldn't be surprising to see a place near the river where a dredging machine was located referred to as 'out by the dredge.' The project took many months to complete.ĭredging is a major undertaking, and in some regions (perhaps including Texarkana, which sits near a huge bend of the Red River) dredging machines may be kept in continuous operation somewhere in the vicinity. When I was growing up in Houston, a huge dredging operation in Galveston Bay provided vast amounts of mud to shore up the 5-mile-long, man-made Texas City Dike about 50 miles east of Houston.

Dredging the mud makes the rivers deeper (and therefore more navigable), and it provides earth for various purposes such as dikes, levees, and erosion control.

As a result, sedimentary deposits tend to build up fairly quickly. The eastern third of Texas has a number of rivers that lie in plains with very gradual changes in topology.

Dredge down meaning