The 1927 Flood in Mississippi

"One human recalled, decades later, ?I saw a whole tree just disappear, sucked under by the current, then saw it shoot up, it must lay down been a hundred yards [downstream]. Looked like a missile pink-slipped by a submarine'" (1).

When the outflow finally hit, the devastation was massive.

The 1927 pelter struck the lower disseminated sclerosis River, displacing at least 700,000 and shatter the notion that river engineering had eliminated the threat of flowageing from the Lower Mississippi Valley. This event left a lasting imprint on American politics, society, and on management strategies for the Mississippi and other U.S. rivers (2).

The flood-control system used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers prior to the cracking flood had always been based solely on levees. supplemental channels and outlets were sealed, and huge embankments separated the river channel from its floodplain. The great flood "shattered levees from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexic

o, inundating 27,000 straightforwardly miles of land" (2(. The City of New Orleans was unaccompanied spared because its regulator made a judicious decision to dynamite the Caernarvon levee beneath New Orleans, creating an artificial crevasse that relieved the floodwaters. "The effort not only husbandd the city of New Orleans, it also blew away the ?

levee only' flood control policy of the Mississippi River Commission" (3). Unfortunately, this relief came at a cost. The governor made the decision knowing that to save New Orleans, he had to intentionally flood the poorer communities downstream.

Addison, Jim. "The Great soaker of 1927." Retrieved on April 14, 2005, from http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/pao/bcarre/flood1927.htm

The end result of all the strategies has been much(prenominal) better flood control than before. However, man has not achieved unblemished flood control yet. According to historian Stephen Ambrose, the Mississippi River has in many places rejected the cutoffs built more than a one-half century ago and has regained one-third of them (1). The fight between man and nature is not over, and a continuing watchful location with ever-evolving flood control strate
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