The Great Flood

On Good Friday, the rains were so heavy that in New siege of Orleans in 18 hours there were 15 inches of rain, and for the inhabitants watching the water swell at an alarming rate was " exchangeable facing an angry, dark oceanic" (1). "One man recalled, decades later, ?I see a full-length tree just disappear, sucked under by the current, then saw it shoot up, it must have been a hundred yards [downstream]. Looked like a missile fired by a submarine'" (1).

When the fountain finally hit, the devastation was massive.

The 1927 spring struck the lower disseminated sclerosis River, displacing at least 700,000 and shattering the notion that river engineering had eliminated the affright of flooding from the Lower Mississippi Valley. This event left a lasting imprint on American politics, society, and on focussing strategies for the Mississippi and some other U.S. rivers (2).

The flood- view as strategy used by the U.S. army Corps of Engineers prior to the great flood had always been establish solely on levees. Secondary channels and outlets were sealed, and huge embankments spaced the river channel from its floodplain. The great flood "shattered levees from Illinois to the Gu

lf of Mexico, inundating 27,000 square miles of land" (2(. The City of New Orleans was only spared because its governor made a judicious finale to dynamite the Caernarvon levee below New Orleans, creating an artificial crevasse that relieved the floodwaters.

"The elbow grease not only saved the city of New Orleans, it withal blew away the ?levee only' flood control policy of the Mississippi River consignment" (3). Unfortunately, this relief came at a cost. The governor made the decision knowing that to save New Orleans, he had to intentionally flood the poorer communities downstream.

After the 1927 flood, radical changes were made in flood control strategies, and the responsibility for disaster recovery efforts was elevated from the local to the theme level. The "levees only" policy was replaced with the multifaceted structural approach that is allay in use today. Levees have not been removed from the strategy, and their use has been augmented with "meander cutoffs, flood outlets, upstream reservoirs, and other measures" (1).

Ambrose, Stephen. "Man vs. Nature: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927." Retrieved on April 14, 2005, from h
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