DAY AND NIGHT WEARY MEN FOUGHT THE MAD RIVER Windy days are extrahazardous in high-water times along the lower river, for then lapping waves bite at the levee top. Unless promptly checked, any tiny break may soon become a roaring crevasse. To avert this, a tight board fence is often built at the river's edge and banked behind with dirt. Caught by the rising waters, wild creatures of the lowlands, such as deer, rabbits, turkey, and quail, fled to the levees and unafraid mingled with domestic animals. Men protected them. Only the snake was denied refuge (see, also, text, page 248). This tired doe, in obvious distress, was roped and helped ashore. A TINY TRICKLE OVER A LEVEE MAY GROW TO A RAGING TORRENT Dynamite was used to make this small break in the levee at a point about twelve miles below New Orleans. Later, other charges were fired to widen it, in order to increase the volume of the flood pouring through and thus relieve pressure on the levee at New Orleans. USING LONG-HANDLED POST-HOLE DIGGERS TO PLANT DYNAMITE To widen the Poydras crevasse below New Orleans, and thus relieve the overloaded Mississippi, another section of levee was blown out at this point. A few minutes after the photograph was taken, 1,500 pounds of explosive were fired, blowing hundreds of tons of dirt high into the air (see, also, illustration, page 251). RESCUE BOATS WERE RUN LIKE AN ARMY TRANSPORT FLEET Pushing their big barges, light-draft stern-wheelers moved from town to town in the yellow sea, or from one marooned group to another, loading and hauling people, furniture, and livestock to safety. Photographs Courtesy American Red Cross RUSHING BOAT BUILDING IN ADVANCE OF THE COMING FLOOD Although nearly every family along the lower Mississippi Valley owned some kind of boat, so unprecedented was the 1927 flood that many more craft had to be quickly built. The boatbuilding scene in this Louisiana lumberyard was reenacted in many other places, under Red Cross guidance (see, also, illustration, page 274). NO COAXING WAS NEEDED TO MAKE THESE BOYS "COME AND GET IT" 50 miles in width. Over 750,000 people normally live within its limits. Flying over it now in an airplane, you see the roofs of their houses, the smokestacks of their sawmills, their church steeples, the tops of their shade trees, and lines of telegraph poles sticking up from the water. From high in the air, too, you see railway embankments etched sharply against the yellow background of water, and you know that all railways are not really built as straight as they look on the folders. So, despite the incredible volume of water flowing down the valley, it usually travels slowly, because it is so broadly spread out. In fact, it took this inland sea which has formed west of the Mississippi's west dike about five weeks to push its way through forests, fields, over railway embankments, and local levee systems from southeast Missouri down into Louisiana. There the levees broke at Bayou des Glaises, above the great Atchafalaya Basin, flooding the Acadian land of Evangeline. Of course, when the main levee of the Mississippi River breaks a widening stream rushes through at terrific speed. One saw this in the break at Stop Land ing, above Greenville. There the escaping water poured through the crevasse it made in the levee, then broke through the local protecting levee on the north side of Greenville, and swept the streets of that city at fifteen miles an hour. So it is these breaks in the main levees, rather than the slow-moving inland sea formed from backwater, that most imperil the lives of lowland dwellers. From the slow-moving flood behind the levees, most people could readily escape, by starting in time. A typical example of this occurred near Marianna, Arkansas. When flood waters began to appear in the bottom lands near there, residents of the city, having been warned that the flood would be a bad one, had already made plans to rescue their country neighbors of the bottom lands. Barges and power boats were requisitioned, tents and cots ordered, food supplies laid in, and committees named to handle different phases of rescue work. By this timely, systematic effort, about 6,000 people were safely removed from the lowlands. Not a human being was lost and even practically all the livestock was saved. This, in general, was the res |