Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  The Mississippi itself grew fat and swollen, until it too overflowed above Cairo. Tens of thousands more acres went under water.

  Along the 1,100 miles of the lower Mississippi, from Cairo to the Gulf, only levees were in place to contain the energy of the river. For the length of that levee line the great earthworks seemed an impregnable fortress, towering two and three stories above the flat delta land. The Mississippi River Commission had pride and confidence in them.

  Indeed, that year, even while threatening clouds formed over much of the drainage basin of the Mississippi River, General Edgar Jadwin, new chief of the Army Corps of Engineers, had for the first time officially stated in his annual report that the levees were finally in condition “to prevent the destructive effect of floods.”

  But the gauge readings were disturbing. The U.S. Weather Bureau noted that the average reading through the last three months of 1926 on every single river gauge on each of the three greatest rivers of North America, the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi itself—encompassing nearly 1 million square miles and stretching the width of the continent—was the highest ever known. The Weather Bureau later stated, “There was needed neither a prophetic vision nor a vivid imagination to picture a great flood in the lower Mississippi River the following spring.”

  But that fall no one at the Weather Bureau or the Mississippi River Commission correlated or even compiled this information. The individuals who made the readings simply noted them and forwarded the information to Washington.

  The gauge at Vicksburg, which lay at the foot of the Delta and roughly halfway between Cairo and the Gulf, was even more disturbing. In October the Vicksburg gauge usually hovered not far above zero, a low-water mark. Only six times in history had the river exceeded 30 feet on the Vicksburg gauge in October. Each time, the following spring saw a record or near-record high water.

  Usually, records on gauges are broken by inches, rarely by more than a foot. No October reading had ever broken 31 feet. In October 1926, the gauge at Vicksburg exceeded 40 feet.

  Late in October the rain ceased. Those watching the river relaxed.

  SIX WEEKS LATER unusually violent storms carrying heavy precipitation began pelting the Mississippi valley again. On December 13, in South Dakota the temperature fell 66 degrees in 18 hours, followed by an intense snowstorm. Helena, Montana, received 29.42 inches of snow. In Minnesota snowdrifts of 10 feet were reported. As the storm swept south and east, 5.8 inches of rain fell on Little Rock in one day, with Memphis reporting 4.11 inches and Johnson City, Tennessee, near the Virginia line, 6.3 inches. By Christmas, 1926, heavy flooding had begun.

  To the west, three children drowned in Arkansas as the continuing rains turned streams into torrents. To the east, the Big Sandy River, dividing West Virginia and Kentucky, overflowed. The Cumberland River rose to the highest level ever recorded and flooded Nashville. The Tennessee River rose to near record levels and flooded Chattanooga. At least sixteen people died in Tennessee, with thousands homeless over Christmas. The Yazoo River, running through the heart of the Mississippi Delta, overflowed and left hundreds more homeless. Goodman, Mississippi, had the highest water in thirty years. The Illinois Central, running north-south, and the Columbus & Greenville, running east-west, both suspended railroad traffic across Mississippi.

  THE CHIEF, but by no means sole, determinant of how dangerous a flood will be is the height of its crest. This crest is not a wave but a gradual swelling; it is by definition simply the highest point to which a river rises. Flood height depends on several factors, with volume of water only the most obvious. Another is the speed with which a crest moves downriver. The slower it moves, the more dangerous it is: slower floods exert pressure on levees for a longer time, and slower floods carrying the same volume of water rise higher.

  Common sense explains why. Floods are measured in cubic feet per second, also known as “cfs” or “second-feet,” a dynamic measure of both volume and force. (When considering issues like storage and irrigation, engineers instead use the static measure of “acre-feet”; 1 acre-foot of water covers 1 acre of land with water 1 foot deep. Although 1 second-foot of water flowing for one day almost exactly equals 2 acre-feet, the two terms represent different concepts and do not equate easily.)

  The number of second-feet is obtained by multiplying the average speed of the current times the river’s “cross section.” A large river might have a width of 1,000 feet and an average depth of 10 feet; its cross section would measure 10,000 square feet. If the current is moving at 10 feet each second—almost 7 miles per hour, a current fast enough that a person would have to break into a run to keep pace with driftwood floating downstream—then the river would be carrying 100,000 cubic feet per second. If the current slowed to 5 feet per second, the cross section of the river would have to double to pass the same 100,000 cfs. The river would have to either spread wider or rise higher, or both. Similarly, if the current accelerated to 15 feet per second, the river could accommodate the same 100,000 cfs with a cross section one-third smaller. So the slower the current, the bigger the cross section—and the higher the flood height—need be. The faster the current, the smaller the cross section—and the lower the flood height—need be.

  Current velocity depends on the slope of the river toward sea level and on conditions in a particular stretch of river. In some reaches the river flows in a straight line and moves faster; in others it constantly collides with bends or rough spots on the bottom and slows down. Friction—with wind, the riverbank, the riverbed, sediment pushed along the bottom or carried in suspension—can influence current velocity. So can tides, whose influences on the Mississippi reach north of Baton Rouge, and other factors.

  Even in a particular locality, the average speed of a river current is just that, an average. In midstream, water contends with less friction than near the banks and generally moves faster; water 20 feet deep faces less friction than on the surface, and so on. On the Mississippi violent differences in currents can create undertows that pull 100 feet straight down, or whirlpools as large as 800 feet long and 200 feet across, large enough to swallow trees, flotsam, or boats. As Ellet observed, “It is no unusual thing to find a swift current and corresponding fall on one shore towards the south, and on the opposite shore a visible current and an appreciable slope towards the north.”

  Floods increase the height of the river—in some sections of the Mississippi the average high-water mark may be 50 feet higher than low water—and therefore increase the slope and the speed of the current. If the river is low, and a sudden surge of water is poured into it, the current speeds up. But if the river is already high when more water enters, the river can act like a dam, forcing the additional water to pile up and slow down. Backwater flooding occurs when the main river is so high a tributary cannot empty into it; water from the main river can actually push water upstream into the tributary.

  A classic study reveals how flood crests can move at very different speeds. It compared two different flood crests flowing down the same 307 miles of river, from Cairo, Illinois, to Helena, Arkansas, in 1922.

  In one case the flood crest poured into the river at Cairo when the Mississippi was low and swept downriver at a speed almost double the average current velocity of the river. The crest, in effect, was a separate layer of water that skidded down the top of the river, traveling the 307 miles in three days.

  In the second case the crest entered the lower Mississippi when the river was already high and flooding, and the river dammed up the new flood crest. The new crest moved only one-third as fast as the average speed of the whole river, and took eight days to go the same 307 miles. This crest was, in effect, a layer of water that had to wait for the river channel to empty out before it could flow south. In the meantime, it rose higher than it otherwise would have.

  There is no standard speed for a flood. Engineers have observed a maximum sustained current velocity in the Mississippi of 13 feet per second, roughly 9 miles an hour. The power of a mass s
everal miles wide and 100 or more feet deep moving at 9 miles per hour is, literally, awful. And a Corps study concludes that, in a large lower Mississippi flood, “stage transmission” averages 419 miles a day. (The stage is the height of the river surface as measured by gauges up and down the river.) This does not mean that a flood crest covers 419 miles in a day, but some of the force of an approaching crest—some indication of it—travels downriver at almost 18 miles an hour.

  The most dangerous floods are those that contain several flood crests. The first crest fills the storage capacity of the river, causing later ones to rise higher than they otherwise would. Meanwhile, the river’s pressure on the levees intensifies. In 1927 the U.S. Weather Bureau station at Cairo, Illinois, noted ten distinct flood crests moving down the Mississippi.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1927, the Mississippi River reached flood stage at Cairo, the earliest for any year on record. Then the storms abated. As Congress reconvened, representatives from Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee wired their respective governors to find out if they should seek federal aid for the flooded districts. The governors unanimously wired back that no help was needed.

  Meanwhile, several events early in the year were signaling the passing of an age. The Kate Adams, the last of the old Mississippi packets, burned in Memphis. Even the violently anti-southern black newspaper Chicago Defender wrote lovingly, “To plantation people—both races alike—the ‘Kate’ was a living creature, whose sonorous whistle, audible as far as 20 miles inland, was the signal for joyous cries. Straightening from their tasks at the sound, cotton pickers with grinning faces would shout across the field ‘Yer comes the lovin’ Kate.’”

  In Greenville, Granville Carter, a black man, retired. He could not read but had run a newsstand and bookstore for both races downtown since 1880. The Greenville Democrat-Times editorialized, “Carter entered business on what was at the time Front St. That street and Mulberry Street have gone into the river…. He sold school books to girls learning their ABCs. He was always trusted. There are a great many people who say [the colored man] is beaten up and given no chance in Mississippi. The case of Carter is a complete refutation of their statements. The people of Greenville are always ready to acknowledge service, whether from black skin or white skin.” But neither black nor white took over Carter’s store. It closed.

  In New York, Walter Gifford, president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, made the first regular long-distance telephone call from New York to London, while Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover participated in the first public demonstration of television as picture and sound traveled from New York to Washington.

  In Washington, talk about the 1928 presidential race had already begun. If Coolidge chose not to run again, ex-Governor Frank Lowden of Illinois was the favorite. Other likely GOP candidates were General Leonard Wood, who had been expected to win the 1920 nomination, Senate Majority Leader Charles Curtis, and Vice President Charles Dawes. One man not considered a serious contender was Herbert Hoover.

  In California, Charlie Chaplin’s divorce was a running story. America’s newspapers, newly taken with celebrity, published accounts on page 1.

  At the same time, in Arkansas the state senate overwhelmingly rejected a bill, passed by the House, outlawing the teaching of evolution.

  In Fulton, Kentucky, a police sergeant was shot and killed by a Negro in an Illinois Central station. The sergeant had gone into the station to clear out the “hoboes, stragglers and floaters who drift in and use the place.” The shooting occurred at midnight. The Negro was killed in the subsequent gun battle.

  In Columbus, Mississippi, a Negro attacked a police officer with an ice pick. According to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, the police officer was “questioning” him in the police station about a burglary, and the Negro was heard to shout, “You hain’t got de only gun in de world. Jes’ give me dat icepick an’ I’ll show you who comes out of here alive.” Also in Columbus, the Clarion-Ledger reported, “The local Klan of the Ku Klux having just recently come into possession of reliable information that a notorious dive known as the ‘Blue Goose’ had become a nuisance to residents of the city, visited the place a few nights ago and found only a small quantity of liquor.”

  In Amite, Louisiana, fifty miles north of New Orleans, several farmers were indicted on charges of kidnapping a family of Negroes at gunpoint, taking them into Mississippi, and selling the whole lot for a twenty-dollar bill; the Negroes were forced to work without pay for weeks under armed guards.

  The Memphis Commercial-Appeal ran a long story on the Delta & Pine Land Company, a cotton plantation of 60,000 acres, the largest in the world. British investors had pieced the plantation together a few years before and, said the paper, turned the rich soil into a giant, efficient factory: “Almost the first person employed on the property was a physician instructed to stamp out malaria and venereal diseases in the shortest possible time…. A competent civil engineer was on the job almost as soon as the doctors…. There are thirty-one negro churches on the company properties…elementary schools…an agricultural high school is under consideration…a modern fully equipped tenants hospital…. A newspaper is issued weekly for the benefit of the negro population…with a paid circulation of 1300 a year confined almost entirely to the tenants of the property.”

  Plantation headquarters lay in Scott, Mississippi, fifteen or so miles north of Greenville, near a sharp and dangerous bend in the Mississippi River and just below the closed Cypress Creek outlet. The river’s tremendous mass collided with the bend at Scott, generating enormous and complex forces and putting intense pressure on the levees. In fact, the area was considered one of the weakest spots anywhere on the river’s levee system.

  In New Orleans in January the first Mardi Gras balls were being held. They were exclusive affairs for the season’s finest debutantes. Unfortunately, a major Carnival parade had to be aborted. “Cornets, trombones, bass horns filled with water from the driving rain,” reported the Times-Picayune. “Proteus, Monarch of the Sea, with his parade less than half completed decided the downpour was too heavy and turned his pageant back to the den.” It was the heaviest rain in fifty-two years. The storm covered half the continent and made the paper’s front page: “From the Rockies to the Ozarks a blanket of snow was being laid tonight…in some places the heaviest of the winter.”

  The storms had returned.

  PITTSBURGH, where the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers form the Ohio, was flooded on January 23; five days later the Ohio flooded downtown Cincinnati. That crest took twenty-nine days to travel from Pittsburgh to New Orleans; a second flood at Pittsburgh on March 1 took thirty-eight days to go the same distance. The storage capacity of the Mississippi was filling.

  The Illinois River at Beardstown, Illinois, had reached flood stage on September 5, 1926. It would remain in flood for 273 of the next 307 days. On every gauge from Cairo to New Orleans, the Mississippi itself reached flood stage early, often the earliest on record; it would remain in flood for as long as 153 consecutive days.

  Water reaching the river was piling higher, rising against already saturated levees. Unseasonably high stages the preceding fall had prevented many of the levee repairs and maintenance normally carried out at low water. Now along the length of the levee system the weight of the river grew, its weight pushing outward against the levees, seeking its floodplain.

  By February 4, the White and the Little Red Rivers had broken through levees in Arkansas, flooding more than 100,000 acres with water 10 to 15 feet deep and leaving 5,000 people homeless.

  A week later New Orleans received 5.54 inches of rain in twenty-four hours. Similarly heavy rains deluged much of the lower Mississippi valley, generating violent local floods that killed thirty-two people.

  In New Orleans, Colonel Charles L. Potter, chairman of the Mississippi River Commission, said reassuringly, “Although river stages along the Mississippi are high for this time of year, no serious troubl
e with flood waters is expected this spring unless more rain than usual falls in the upper valley and tributaries.”

  March opened with a severe blizzard striking Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska, and parts of Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas. The storm then swept east and dumped record snowfall in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, where buildings gave way under the weight. Farther south it rained.

  The Tennessee River flooded for the second time in a few weeks, covering highways and sweeping one railroad bridge away, severing communication. In Mississippi on March 15 the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported, “The virtual flood of rain which fell Saturday did considerable damage to highways and railroads, crippling service throughout the state.” The next day, March 16, an additional four inches of rain fell, and the Mississippi National Guard was mobilized to guard the levees.

  The storms turned violent. Between March 17 and March 20, three different tornadoes in the lower Mississippi valley killed forty-five people. High winds whipped the Mississippi into whitecaps and sent waves crashing into the levees; the waves did severe damage, virtually tearing off the crown of some sections.

  In every levee district on the river, supplies were laid in and men met to plan the deployment of their forces. In January, Seguine Allen, the chief engineer of the Mississippi Levee Board, headquartered in Greenville and with jurisdiction over 184 miles of riverfront, had pleaded with Major John Lee, in charge of the Mississippi River Commission’s Vicksburg office, for money to raise the low spots in his district. On March 23, Allen arranged delivery of dozens of generators, hundreds of feet of wire, and four railroad cars full of hundreds of thousands of empty cotton sacks, each one 20 inches wide and 36 inches long. The generators and wire were to string lights on the levee at night so work could proceed twenty-four hours a day. The sacks were for sandbagging; the levee board could return them, if not used, without charge. LeRoy Percy, a governor of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, talked to bankers at the Chase Bank in New York, at the Canal Bank—the largest in the South—in New Orleans, and elsewhere in case emergency loans to several levee boards became necessary. He did not want to lose to the river for lack of resources.