When the winter of 1926-1927 brought heavy rains, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was not perturbed. They had built a system of levees intended to contain any flood waters. However, flood waters were so heavy that they overflowed the banks of the MississippiÆs tributaries in Oklahoma, Kansas, Illinois, and Kentucky (1). Torrential spring rains brought the situation to a critical pass, but the Army Corps of Engineers assured the public that the levees the Corps had built would hold.
Meanwhile, James Buchanan Eads, the engineer who built the first railroad bridge over the Mississippi, proposed cut-offs to straighten the course of the river and speed it up. He had done just this at South Pasr, at the mouth nf the river, and the correction had lowered the bed so the river would carry more water faster. Eads urged that the floods could be permanently lowered, and levees would not even be needed. Sadly, though, ôno cut-offs were dug. Nor was another idea, to build reservoirs on the tributaries to hold back the water. Nor were any outlets dug. The Corps of Engineers--and then the residents of the Valley--relied on levees onlyö (1).
On Good Friday, the rains were so heavy that in New Orleans in 18 hours there were 15 inches of rain, and for the inhabitants watching the water swell at an alarming rate was ôlike facing an angry, dark oceanö (1). ôOne man recalled, decades later, æI saw a whole 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 submarineÆö (1).
When the flood finally hit, the devastation was massive.
The 1927 flood struck the lower Mississippi River, displacing at least 700,000 and shattering the notion that river engineering had eliminated the threat of flooding from the Lower Mississippi Valley. This event left a lasting imprint on American politics, society, and on management strategies for...