From the media accounts, you would think that nothing like the current New Orleans and Gulf Coast disaster had ever happened before in America.
But a 1900 hurricane (6000 deaths) and a 1927 Mississippi flood (one million homeless) have been comprehensively described in recent books.
Do any of our media elites read?
Amazon listing for John Barry's book, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.
For a fictionalized but true account of the 1900 hurricane that claimed 6000 lives in Galveston, Texas, see Amazon listing for: Isaac's Storm.
From a Google search html cache, Barry Interview on 1927 Mississippi Flood (Source pdf from a PBS article, Great Projects Interview: John Barry. Link supplied by a Power Line post, They're tryin' to wash us away .):
Interview with John M. Barry, author of Rising Tide, for “A Tale of Two Rivers” [/] Note: This transcript is from a videotaped interview for the “A Tale of Two Rivers” segment of“Great Projects.” It has been edited lightly for readability.[…] JB: Well, according the levees-only theory which was based on a 17th century Italian engineernamed Gugiel Menee's observations and hypotheses, you wanted actually to increase the water inthe river, because the more water in the river, the higher the slope and, therefore, the faster thecurrent is going to move, which is true. And the faster the current was going to move, then the moreit was going to scour out the bottom of the river, which is also true. The problem is, it's not going toincrease the scour enough to accommodate the extraordinary enormous increase in water, really ageometric progression between low water and a great flood. So, you know, the Corps of Engineerskept sticking to this hypothesis despite the fact that every scientific observation contradicted it. Soyou had a disaster that was waiting to happen.
[…] JB: Yeah. The flood control plan that the Corps of Engineers put in after the ‘27 flood is basicallywhat's in place today, with some adjustments. And, of course, Jadwin didn't write the plan. In fact,he had a very sharp engineer who had been in the Corps, but actually was then a civilian -- he had aphysical disability that forced him to retire from the Army -- who wrote the plan. And it was a goodplan, you know, once they gave up the hypothesis of levees-only. You know, there were a couple ofgaps in it and there were some political problems with it -- chiefly, in effect, the plan would haveallowed the flooding of the State of Arkansas and Louisiana, essentially using that as a naturalreservoir. Originally the levees in Arkansas were going to be lower than the levees on theMississippi side, so the river would naturally flood in Arkansas. That was ultimately taken care ofby what was then a very controversial policy called cut-offs. The river moves like a dollar sign, inS’s. And a cut-off is like the straight line through a dollar sign. It straightens the river and,therefore, it carries more water faster. But there were a lot of people who thought cut-offs were notgoing to work. And, in fact, they've worked pretty well, not perfectly. They shorten the river by150 miles in total, and that lowered the flood plain in Greenville, Mississippi, for example, by 15feet, which is an enormous lowering. That was initially. Now since the cut-offs have been put in,the river has regained probably one-third of that length and some of the lowering of the flood plains-- some of those benefits have been lost. And ultimately the river will probably regain all thelength. And then you make more cut-offs, I guess.
[…] JB: Well, there are a lot of mistakes you could make. One is a policy mistake, such as the levees-only policy. The other is some weakness in the levee. It needs to be maintained. They can settle.You have to keep rebuilding them. There's a levee, a fairly lengthy stretch of levee, in the state ofMississippi right now that is eight feet below grade for Project Flood. Eight feet is an enormousdistance. I mean that is a lot of water. Eight feet of water, you know, a mile wide moving at eight ornine miles an hour, just think of how much water that is that you've got to take care of for eightfeet. But there are a lot of little things that can destroy a levee. In the old days -- this doesn'thappen anymore -- but if during the construction somebody left a log or even really a branch in thelevee, it rots and creates a cavity. That's a weakness. When the water saturates a levee, which it willdo automatically in a flood, it finds that little cavity and starts to eat away at it. Even some crawfishnests. A crawfish builds a nest in the levee and that -- that's a cavity. The water comes in and startsto erode that, and pure pressure as well. Just the weight of the water pressing against the sides willpush water through the levee and it'll come out on the other side. Some of this seepage is perfectlysafe. Some of it is quite dangerous. And you can get what's called sand boils and a sand boil isreally like a miniature volcano. It looks just like a volcano, and it'll spout water in a sort of agusher. If the water is clear, then it's safe. But if the water is muddy, that means that it's eroding thelevee. The water, as it runs through the levee, is taking the earth of the levee with it. And that has tobe taken care of immediately. And, again, just the constant pressure of the water against the levee,the levee can slough off. That has to be supported. I mean there are an infinite number of problemsthat can arise.
[…] JB: Well, you've got to understand that when there's a crevasse, it's not simply the water flowingover the top of the levee as if it were overflowing a bath tub. What you get is tremendousturbulence, unbelievable forces at work, and in a great crevasse the river will gouge out a hole inthe earth and the greatest crevasse on record, which was in 1927 about 15 miles north ofGreenville, Mississippi, you know, the hole in the levee was about two-thirds of a mile wide. Andthey sounded it with a hundred-foot line and found no bottom. It was later they figured out that itwas 130 feet deep. So you had this hole, you know, over, as I said, about two-thirds of a mile wide,130 feet deep pouring water onto the land. Obviously, that is a ferocious current when it first hitsthe land. So a house is not gonna stand up to that under any circumstances. In fact, trees, forests,whatever, they're just simply wiped out, but as the water spreads out and slows down, you know,people with some experience in the delta would, for example, leave their doors open to f allow thewater into the house, 'cause if they closed everything off, then it had this resistance and it would --it would just, you know, undermine it or overpower it. But if they let the doors and windows open,the water could flow through it. That was one of devices for people who had experience withfloods.You know, the 1927 Flood was two stories. It was man against nature, but it was also man againstman.
And part of the story in man against man involved the city of New Orleans, which in 1927was a much more vibrant and vital city than it is today. It was, by far, the leading city in the South,economically dwarfed, literally double and triple Miami, Houston, Dallas, Nashville, Louisville,any of its rivals. And one of the things that the people in New Orleans who ran the city wereconcerned about was fear of their investors, who were mostly in New York and Boston, of what theMississippi River might do to New Orleans in a big flood. So here, you had this tremendous floodcoming down the river and, oddly enough, it didn't threaten New Orleans. And the reason it didn'tthreaten New Orleans was because there was no possible way that that water was ever going tomake it to New Orleans. The levees upriver had to break. They had to, as, in fact, they did. Forexample, the river spread out 70 miles from Vicksburg to Monroe, Louisiana. But before thathappened, while people in New York were worrying about whether or not they should put moremoney into New Orleans and invest in the port and so forth, the city fathers decided to demonstratethat they would never, under any circumstances, allow the river to threaten the city. So what theydid was decide to dynamite the levee about 13 miles below the city and flood out their neighbors. Race had nothing to do with this. They were almost all poor whites who were flooded out.INT: Describe what happens when levees break upriver.JB: When the levees upriver break, it lets water out of the river. So, therefore, the level in the rivergets lower. In fact, in every flood there's concerns about sabotage, 'cause if the levee on one side ofthe river breaks, that side floods, but the people on the other side of the river are safe. And, in fact,there were at least a dozen people killed in separate gun battles in 1927 over attempts to sabotagethe levee. And, in fact, in Vicksburg, the record on the Vicksburg gauge is not 1927. The reason isthe water had spread out to Monroe, Louisiana, 70 miles away. So, obviously, that's going to lowerthe water level.
[…] And Jadwin finally went along only if New Orleans promised to,among other things, fully compensate the victims of the dynamiting, which they freely promised.And, in fact, 54 leading men of New Orleans, the president of every major business, the presidentof every trade association, the city council, the mayor, and so forth, they all signed a pledge thatthey would, in fact, compensate the victims fully. A couple years later when the claims came in,they'd paid off pennies on the dollar and there were roughly 10,000 who were flooded out of theirhomes. When the water went through, there was absolutely nothing left. And their homes weregone, their means of making a living disappeared, and they got an average of $80 a person,something like that.
[…] JB: In this flood there were actually several hundred thousand people who were picked off rooftopsor levees or from trees. And Hoover gathered together a fleet of over 800 boats and there were afew steamboats, major paddle wheelers that rolled down the river. In some cases they wouldactually roll on what had been land and they would act as a mother ship and there would be, asmaller boats that would go out usually in a given area that would go with a mail man, who knewthe routes, knew where the houses were or at least had been, knew what certain signs were and theywould go look for people. And they did an absolutely extraordinary job. I mean literally a hundredthousand people were picked off rooftops and trees. I mean it was an unbelievably well organizedrescue operation. But the whole area was known, from the great crevasse at Mound's Landing in theState of Mississippi, I know, for more than 50 miles to the east to the hills, there was nothing but water. And for 75 miles south from that break there was nothing but water. That's an inland sea. Onthe other side of the river, the river went from Vicksburg to Monroe, Louisiana, and that's 70 miles.Again, all of it essentially under water, some of it under five feet of water, some of it under a gooddeal more water. In central Louisiana further south in the Chafalaya Basin, again, you know,hundreds of thousands of people. In total, there were roughly a million people living in the lowerMississippi region that was flooded by the river. Almost two-thirds of them were fed by the RedCross. The rest basically left and went to stay with relatives outside the area. There were 330,000people living in tents for months. And the population of the United States at the time was roughly120 million people. So what you've got is nearly one percent of the entire population of the UnitedStates was flooded in 1927.
[…] JB: Sure. Let's say you had situations up and down the river. You've got 335,000-340,000 peopleliving in tents, many of them for months. In some cases the only dry land is the levee itself. Theriver's on one side, flooded territory's on the other side. The levee has got a crown eight feet wide, alittle bit more than that is out of water, and these refugee camps stretch for miles up the levee. Inmany places it's very difficult to supply. In several places dogs were being shot for fear of rabies.There was fear of epidemics. There's livestock being penned up next to these refugee camps. Thewhole scene really looks like the devastation of a war. And when the river went through towns,again, it's not high water generally, but when this river went through, there was just tremendousdevastation left everywhere.
[…] JB: I don't pretend to be an expert on the [19]93 flood, but while it was occurring I had already startedworking on this book. And I was amazed. I had started my book reading about the levees-onlytheory and whether levees were good or levees were bad. And this was material that was written inthe 1830s and the exact same debate was going on after the '93 flood in almost the exact samelanguage. If you change the grammar a little bit, you could simply interchange the arguments,which I found more than just amusing. “Amusing” is not the right word. But the issues are politicalissues largely at this point, much more than technical issues any you know, what are you going todo with the flood plain? A lot of that flood plain is awfully valuable and I personally think it's rightto take much of that and use it. Some of the flood plain may not be so valuable or protecting it istoo expensive. But that's really the debate, the political issues. You know, there are, obviously,some technical problems, particularly in the upper river, and lack of coordination and things likethat which contributed greatly to the disaster in [19]93. But ultimately the society has to make apolitical decision on what it's going to do with that river’s flood.
[…] JB: Well, I mean the basic argument is what impact levees have. And, of course, they will protect,-- when they work -- some land, but then they pass the problem both up and down the river. Theypass the problem along to neighbors.
[…] JB: I'd say the work done on the Mississippi, obviously. Historically it's been chiefly to protectpeople living along the river and to allow them to develop the river. And to a significant extent, it'sachieved that goal. Now the question is whether or not the society wants to continue to pay theprice to protect all that land, whether the river, for reasons of beauty or environmental health orflood control, should be allowed to reclaim some of that land, whether in natural reservoirs andother wetlands. I think it should, you know, and probably most people would agree with that. Thequestion is--and here’s where the fight is--where you draw the line, over how much you allow toriver to reclaim and how much you continue to protect and at what cost. [my elipses and emphasis]
