One largely forgotten, shameful episode in our history brought back to memory by Hurricane Katrina is the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which was up until last week, the worst flood in American history.

Here is an excerpt from a 1997 review of a book on the subject, Rising Tide:The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry.  Some similarities of that 78-year old New Orleans catastrophe and the one going on today, I find eerie.

[In 1927] the first cracks showed up in the levees. After biblical rains throughout the Midwest, the Mississippi started busting right though weak stretches of levees.

...

As the flood waters started approaching New Orleans, the close-knit cabal of New Orleans bankers who ran Louisiana from their exclusive krewes and clubs decided they were going to save their own skins by dynamiting a levee about 10 miles from the city. They were powerful enough that they didn't even need to do it under the cover of night -- they got the governor to sign an order making the operation legal.

On the afternoon of April 29, 1927, workers started blowing a massive hole in that levee. As New Orleans aristocrats watched from their yachts, the river buried St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes [mostly poor, black areas] under 30 feet of water. The story gets worse: Although the New Orleans bankers had promised to repay the families they had flooded, they later reneged. To compensate for the loss of their homes and livelihood, each family wound up with a pittance of less than $300.

And from a USNews article on the same event:

To save New Orleans, the leaders proposed a radical plan. South of the city, the population was mostly rural and poor. The leaders appealed to the federal government to essentially sacrifice those parishes by blowing up an earthen levee and diverting the water to marshland. They promised restitution to people who would lose their homes. Government officials, including Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, signed off.

On April 29, the levee at Caernarvon, 13 miles south of New Orleans, succumbed to 39 tons of dynamite. The river rushed through at 250,000 cubic feet per second. New Orleans was saved, but the misery of the flooded parishes had only started. The city fathers took years to make good on their promises, and very few residents ever saw any compensation at all.

The 1927 flood killed 246 people and displaced 700,000, mostly African-Americans.  We've barely started to count the toll of Katrina, but we already know it's going to be far, far worse.

Comments

[pierre]

God thats terrible. Coming from South Africa, i'm sort of used to atrocious civil rights actions, but this is quite a sad story indeed.
p