When the River Gods Broke Loose

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 170, 8 October 1927, Page 27 (Supplement)

When the River Gods Broke Loose

Havoc of Unleashed Waters

E is like a god, our Father of Waters; one who saw the last and climacteric stages of his wrathful outburst in 1927 understands why ancients wor-

shipped the Nile. In normal times he strews benevolence, but god-like, he is terrible, divinely irresistible, in his wrath. There comes the day of wrath, as in 1927. Before his immeasurable torrent, the great works of man go down like castles built by children on the sand. No ma.nifestation of nature that I have ever seen—not even a midwinter gale on the North Atlantic—has ever given me such a feeling of untrammelled power (writes Will Irwin in his graphic story of the Mississippi floods in “The World To-day”). Dykes, locally called "levees,” on whose construction and maintenance men have worked by thousands for half a century, snap like match-stems; on the landscape below drops a torrent that uproots venerable trees and crumples houses as though by the squeeze of a gigantic palm. Then, his first anger satisfied, the god settles into a mood less violent but just as sinister and deadly. A mile or two an hour, his flood advances over towns, farms, highways, railways—all the impudent and puny work of man. It has the deliberate cruelty of a snake charming, strangling and swallowing a bird.

The river engineers, watching the Mississippi as a physician watches a patient, saw last November signs of a “wet year” and rushed work on certain levees which might make trouble in high water. By January, the pessimists among them prophesied a flood year, perhaps as bad as 1912 or 1922.

They had, however, less cause to worry than ever before. In the past five years, they had put into effect a system of raised and standardised dykes capable of handling with relative certainty any known Mississippi flood. But the sinister combination of elements continued. The swollen Missouri joined the Mississippi at St. Louis; below that city started the Great Crest —and trouble. Overloaded levees gave way, precipitating a waterfall on towms and farm districts physically unprepared for such calamity. But the loss of human life was infinitesimally small in proportion to the magnitude of the disaster. Probably, when searchers of the ruins have dragged the last corpse from some remote farmhouse, it will amount to no more than three hundred souls. But farm animals perished by thousands and tens of thousands. The southern tributaries were breaking through their levees—a spotted series of floods all over the basin. The experts, making a jury calculation of water-levels and the weather, saw that all things were working together for evil; that this flood, compared with any previous rise, was as a hurricane to a breeze. The engineers buckled to the desperate job of bolstering their inadequatae barriers; and to that end they mobilised an army greater than we have put to any common task since the World War. For two months they fought with all the intensity of real •war.

But the force primeval drove on, almost unchecked. It took toll of southern Illinois, southern Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Where in the sate of Arkansas the bottom-lands widen out, it collaborated with its

fickle tributaries the Arkansas and the White to overflow more than a quarter of the state. It broke across the fecund Yazoo Delta of Mississippi and lapped against the battle-scarred heights of Vicksburg. With “majestic instancy,” it advanced on flat Louisiana. When it had taken the backflow of the Red, the crest came to its height, threatening

that long stretch of one hundred and fifty miles where the channel turns south-eastward and passes New Orleans. The metropolis of the Gulf of Mexico, lying under levees, found it necessary to blow the Poydras Dyke and inundate a vast region in order to relieve the mere preliminary pressure; and stood ready, dynamite in hand, to make still more crevasses,

impose sacrifice on still more farms | and small towns. But the vital point j was that corner where the river takes its turn. This time the defenders lost. Irresistibly the river broke through the levees and reserve levees of its western bank. Down the Atchafalaya basin it rolled to the Gulf, unhoming one hundred and fifty thousand more

inhabitants, but relieving New Orleans. The flood started its work of devastation in early April; its last crests did not spill into the Gulf until mid-July. Meanwhile, it has inundated an area as great as Massachusetts and Connecticut, and driven forth perhaps seven hundred thousand refugees. To describe this disaster were as impossible as to describe the World War. But from isolated firing trenches,

mere pinpricks on the Great Line, an observer might at least catch the atmosphere of the thing. Here are similar glimpses of the Mississippi disaster.

Those army engineers who had experiences overseas remarked on the odd resemblance of the inundated countryside to the rear areas of war. Fringing the front line were the endangered levees; as you approached ! them from the rear, a thousand men. in uniform blue overalls, seemed to be throwing up reserve trenches. Bei hind that, the roads streamed with blank-faced refugees, with herds of migrating cattle and horses. At crossroads, sentries snapped their rifles across their chests and asked you fer your papers. In the highland towns, the open fields blossomed yellow with encampments of army tents, and officials with Red Cross brassards >r nurses in floating veils passed and repassed in furiously driven open cars. Airplanes buzzed overhead; you missed only the line of puff-balls breaking out before their noses. Meantime, in districts over which the enemy must soon advance, life seemed to go on about as usual. Negroes played the banjo at the doors of their huts; long lines of men, bossed by a mounted overseer, hoed in the cane-fields; small cars parked in solid rows before the country stores; girls in gay colours refreshed themselves at the soda fountains. And that, too, except for the American touches, was very like the war! At once, Secretary Hoover stitched together one of those rapid organisations at which he is so adept—sound yet fluid, economical yet supremely efficient. He mobilised a fleet, ranging from Mississippi passenger steamers for use as mother-boats, down through rum-chasers and submarine chasers to lifeboats and converted rafts. He hurried from the New Jersey coast three trainloads of lifesavers with their unsinkable craft. He gathered sixty Army and Navy planes. He had command, before the flood broke the Big Bend, of eight hundred miscellaneous vessels. The Red Cross called in its officers from their regular jobs at the military posts, set them to

building and co-ordinating refugee camps. The Governors and flood directors of the states, the local Red Cross Chapters, and the militia fitted into thin machine as a hand firs inside a glove.

Abreast the forewaters of each separate flood skimmed the hydroplanes, spying out the land, reporting back to the boats the knots of refugees the> had sighted on knolls or unbroken levees or mounds. The fleet followed along the crest, establishing a headquarters in this bayou or that new lake, from which its units operated as the calls came. It was as curious a jumble of craft as the world has ever seen, the personnel, too. represented every shade of working uniform know n to the service. Ahead of disaster went the Red Cross men, organising camps in the highland towns. For their material, ard especially for tents, they denuded the United States Army and the Militia. With the local authorities cooperating, the Red Cross threw up tw o er.campments—one for whites and one for negroes—drained and sanitated according to the best military practice. Always in command were a Red Cross officer and a woman Red Cross worker, skilled in dealing with disaster. Under them served the elite of both col ours. Graduates of such negro institutions as Tuskegee and the University of the South worked in the negro c£imps to keep order, foresee illness, attend to a thousand and one details which would keep their people well and contented. I saw’ the refugees coming into a dozen camps. Almost always there stood at the door a cook ladling out hot coffee. This, perhaps, was by way of preparing these people for a slightly disagreeable experience to follow’. For, as the roster of the unhoused grew from one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand and then to nearly seven hundred thousand, came the danger of smallpox—always existent in these flat, remote lands—and of typhoid fever. Foreseeing this, the Red Cross mobilised doctors and material, prepared to vaccinate and inoculate every refugee in the camps.