Mississippi Levee Broken to Save New Orleans City

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 32, 30 April 1927, Page 9

Mississippi Levee Broken to Save New Orleans City

SETTLERS LIVES IN DANGER

A Mississippi levee has been dynamited to prevent the flood waters of the river from sweeping on to New Orleans. Most of the settlers left the villages that this action doomed but a few preferred to face the peril that was theirs in staying by their homes. In Arkansas 1,000 marooned people are in desperate plight.

p]/ Cable. —Press Assocxatior.. —Copyright Reed. 10 a.m. NEW ORLEANS, Fri. State engineers dynamited 1,000 feet of the Mississippi levee near Violet. Louisiana, on Friday, inun dating the St. Bernard and Plaquemine parishes south of here, most of whose 5,000 residents are in New Orleans, where they hoped to escape the flood waters. A few, however, preferred to chance remaining in their homes.

Two hundred persons were marooned when a dyke broke near

Brunswick, and are reported to be badly in need of assistance. A Little Rock message states that Lake Village reports the plight of nearly 1,000 marooned people in the flooded lowlands of the Chicut County, Arkansas, to be desperate. “They are clinging to small rafts and floating trees In water from 20 to 30 feet deep, or packed like sardines in barn lofts and other places unreached by the raging waters,” states the message.

This number does not include 500 negroes known to be huddled in one plantation.—A. and N.Z.