Good Mornin’! Good Mornin’!
….water, water everywhere, same song, different verse, just a little bit louder and a little bit worse…
Mother Nature woke up on the wrong side of the bed for the whole month of February and has engulfed the Delta in rain and flood water for the umpteenth time.
Ever since the Great Flood of 1927, the Levee Board and Corps of Engineers has worked overtime to keep Ol' Man River out of our businesses and homes but there’s only so many fingers to stick in the dyke and only so much water the Gulf of Mexico and other outlets can drink at one time.
Looking back at the 1927 Flood, it all broke loose on April 21 that year at Mound Landing before two dozen more holes in the levee let loose and more than a billion dollars of damage was done – a third of the nation’s economy at the time.
But this wasn’t the first time the Mississippi River had flooded – there were 11 previous floods but none of this magnitude and thankfully, none of this magnitude since.
The flood created a river 80 miles wide and the force of the levee break at Mound Landing was described as having the force of Niagara Falls.
It flooded 16-million acres of land, destroyed 130,000 homes and more than 700,000 people had no place to go. Ten feet of water covered up towns up to 60 miles away from the river. It would take up to two months for the water to recede.
Peter Nimrod, chief engineer at the Greenville Levee Board, explained the disaster united the nation’s levee problem by putting the Corps of Engineers in control of the entire effort.
“Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1928 and that set up the Mississippi River and tributaries project that not only raised the levees ten feet on average but also floodways and channel improvements,” he explained. This created the system of reservoirs that Mississippians have come to enjoy as their recreational getaways.”
The flood hastened the “mechanization” of farms as much of the “mule power” was decimated. Machines made their way to the fields and laborers numbers were soon reduced. More than 800,000 African Americans left the south in the 1920s. New York grew five times larger and cities like Detroit added nearly 160,000 new residents. Some statistics note that nearly half of the migrants who left Mississippi ended up in Chicago.
“It was a cultural shaping event,” Hodding Carter, formerly of Greenville and now a professor at the University of North Carolina said. “You sit under water for months, you see the massive force of nature just banging your head, you see the best laid plans of men going awry and it tends to have a very strong effect on artistic vision and cultural vision. It was a seminal event for the Delta.”
The flood story itself was headline news across the country and according to Carter. “The story everyone loves to tell is that it took Lindberg’s flight to Paris to take us off the front page of America’s newspapers,” he said.
Even with the levee system in place, no one can contain Mother Nature and disastrous floods have continued in 1973, 1993 and in 2011. None hit the damage magnitude of 1927 thanks to the levee system even though some of the levels have been as high or higher than 1927.
How high is the water, momma? Hopefully, never that high again…
