Yellow Waters

It was like an orange going down an ostrich's neck. Fortnight ago it was up at Wheeling, Portsmouth, Cincinnati. Last week it moved slowly down through Louisville and Evansville to Cairo. But the Ohio River, unlike an ostrich's neck, remained swollen after the orange had passed, for floods recede slowly.

On the national map it was only a little puddle, but to Army planes flying succor, it looked like a shoreless yellow sea studded here and there with tree tops and half submerged buildings. To people crouching on house roofs, it was an immeasurable amount of ugly yellow water surging higher and higher hours without end.

By week's end at Wheeling, W. Va.'s island in midriver, householders were scrubbing mud from their recently submerged floors, shoveling debris from their sidewalks. Portsmouth, Ohio, a sump within its $750,000 seawall which the flood had topped, watched the muddy waters gradually sink back through the sewer gates as the river receded. Cincinnati, perched on its hills, up to its waist in water, felt the chilly flood fall slowly back, trembled as its gas mains were reported leaking,, a bigger fire menace than when gas tanks bobbed among its factories in the flood (TIME, Feb. 1).

Saddest of all was Louisville, Ky. which has virtually no hills. Three-fourths of the city, at flood crest, was inundated. Its business and residential districts alike were in water, its Negro shanties and mansions of the rich. Its electricity was off, its power-station partly submerged in the yellow flood. Over 230,000 Louisville people were homeless, at least 200 dead (no official figures), few of them by drowning, most from exposure. Property loss was estimated at $100,000,000.

These were the sectors where the worst of the flood had passed. Downstream, men were still struggling too excitedly to begin counting their rosary of grief. Evansville, Ind., part of which is perched on a snow-covered bluff, looked down on a yellow sea where its business district and part of its residential district had been. There Paul Schmidt, chairman of the local Red Cross, got a lift from a passing skiff which promptly sank under him. Before a boatload of cameramen would rescue him they made him turn his profile so they could take his picture (see cut). A few miles farther down the sloshing water seemed to have no shore. In Paducah, Ky., at the mouth of the Tennessee River, the Coast Guard reported that 30% of the town was flooded and all families were ordered out of the city. Mound City, on the Illinois shore, stood as a snow-covered rectangle until the yellow waters filled it up. And down at the mouth of the Ohio, Cairo, Ill. was the site of greatest danger.

Behind its 60-ft. seawall Cairo has successfully withstood every flood for decades. On its west flows the Mississippi, on its east the Ohio to meet beyond the southern tip of its peninsula. For years Army engineers have known that Cairo was the worst danger spot on the river. They declared that it was futile to raise her dikes: If the water in the river rose higher than the 60-ft. stage--level with the second story of buildings behind the sea wall--its pressure would simply blow out the sandy subsoil below and come in under the seawall. In past floods there have been serious "sand boils" which had to be hastily plugged with sandbags to keep the river from coming in from below. To raise the city inside above the level of the seawall would have cost upwards of $30,000,000, nearly as much as the entire value of the city's real estate.

So on the west bank of the Mississippi below Cairo a floodway was built--130.000 acres of land enclosed by levees, which could be flooded to draw off water piling up at Cairo. Last week as the yellow flood came down the Ohio and swept into the Mississippi, engineers blasted this "fuse plug" levee, inundated the Birds Point New Madrid Floodway. Cairo's river level promptly fell, giving WPA workers more time to raise Cairo's seawall. They built a great wooden trough, like a window box three feet high, on top of the seawall and filled it with dirt to hold back the Ohio flood that was expected to top the seawall by one or two feet, five feet above the highest previous stage.

Day and night WPA crews labored, subsisting on sandwiches and hardboiled eggs, sleeping on bags of sugar in a warehouse, while women and children--all but 5,000 of the city's 14,000 inhabitants--were evacuated. Meanwhile the Ohio flood not only filled the floodway opposite. It backed up into the Mississippi where water was lower, and for a space the Father of Waters flowed upstream. Then the mounting Ohio backed up also behind Cairo and swept around almost to join the Mississippi on the north. Cairo became virtually an island with only one elevated highway open, a hollow island in whose streets and backyards, far below the river level, sand boils simmered. Boats stood by its embankments ready to evacuate the workers if their work proved in vain.

Relief. At week's end the Red Cross announced that it was already caring for 676,176 homeless people, was operating 360 concentration camps, 108 field hospitals, had 380 trained disaster relief workers and 1,215 nurses in the field. But such figures became obsolete almost as soon as issued. The Coast Guard established headquarters at Evansville, brought 225 of its boats on the scene for rescue work, sent for nearly 200 more from points as far distant as Boston. It had 15 airplanes in action. The U. S. Public Health Service was busy shipping anti-typhoid and smallpox vaccine, diphtheria antitoxin, influenza and pneumonia serum; was mobilizing a corps of sanitary engineers to face new problems as the flood recedes. Revenue agents were ordered to give up "still" chasing and use their cars to transport refugees. Even the Narcotics Bureau was busy shipping supplies of codeine and other needed drugs to the flood area. WPA had thousands of men at work on the levees, and this week Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins starts on a tour to plan rehabilitation behind the flood. CCC had more thousands working at flood relief but the biggest job, the biggest responsibility and the biggest headache belonged to the U. S. Army.

Chief of Staff Malin Craig in Washington announced that he was ready if necessary to evacuate the entire Mississippi flood plain from Cairo to New Orleans. Major General Herbert J. Brees, commanding the Eighth Corps Area on the west bank of the Mississippi, was making preparations to evacuate eastern Arkansas and his troopers were busy setting up concentration camps. In the Fourth Corps Area, east of the Mississippi, Major General George Van Horn Moseley had an even bigger responsibility for on his bank are most of the big river cities, the once great steamboat towns: Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, New Orleans. He divided his front into three sectors with headquarters at Nashville (which had its own high waters on the Cumberland), Jackson, Miss., and New Orleans.

Responsibility. Quite as big as the Army's rescue job was its moral responsibility. It has been largely responsible for the spending of some $325,000,000 since the great flood of 1927, to make the valley flood-safe. Already last week criticisms of the Army's work were being heard. Some said that reforestation was more needed than the Army's levees, that reservoirs should have been built to control the floods at their source, on the headwaters of tributaries, instead of trying to deal with the floods after they were underway, that the Army's calculations of the "super-flood" for which its levee system was built were very far astray because still higher flood stages were actually being recorded at Cairo and below. Fingers were pointed at Dayton, 50 miles above Cincinnati, which, after the disastrous flood of 1913 in the Miami Valley, spent $30,000,000 building five reservoirs to impound headwaters and release them only as fast as the streams could carry them away. Result : Dayton had no flood this year.

Few of these criticisms did the Army Engineers justice. The Army's flood-works were adapted from the plan submitted to Congress in 1927 by Major General Edgar Jadwin, Chief of Engineers. General Jadwin pointed out then that to reduce a Mississippi flood one foot meant holding out 7,000,000 to 11,000,000 acre-feet of water. If 8,000,000 acres of land were reforested and thereby .held back half an inch more water than would flow off farm land, a flood would be reduced just half an inch. On the question of building headwater reservoirs, Army Engineers pointed out that it would take over $1,000,000,000 to do any sort of job to compare with their proposed $300,000,000 levee system. Furthermore reservoirs in the headwaters--they are not practical in the flat valleys of the main stream--might not do the trick. A large part of the rain that causes floods falls in the main valleys. The U. S. Weather Bureau last week published a map showing the distribution of rainfall during the first 25 days of January, the water of the present flood. The heaviest portion, from 16 in. to over 20 in., fell close to the main Ohio and Mississippi valleys from a point below Cincinnati to a point in upper Arkansas. The distribution in 1927 was similar except that it was still lower down the main streams. As General Jadwin said: "A flood of the Mississippi is not the torrential rush of water from denuded hillsides, but is the slowly rising, long continued outpour of the drainage from a vast region."

The Army's flood control plan (General Jadwin's plan modified) was to provide protection from the maximum possible flood. Army Engineers and the Weather Bureau calculated this "superflood" by taking the maximum known flood of each of the Mississippi's great tributaries and assuming that they all hit the main river at once--which they have never done.

This required raising the levees an average of three feet from Cairo to the Gulf. But this was not all. The Mississippi, like most great rivers, has carved a channel sufficient to carry its ordinary waters. In flood times, if not artificially restricted, it spreads its waters over most of its alluvial valley. Levees make the floods higher by penning them in, and levees which are made of dirt cannot be built high enough to hold the whole flood in the river channel, for the subsoil would give way under the pressure, if not the levee itself. Hence when big floods occurred the Army planned to let the river use floodways over the lowlands, to let say 20% of the alluvial plain be submerged in order to protect the rich lands of the other 80%.

One such was the New Madrid Floodway through a strip of eastern Missouri below Cairo. Another was the Eudora Floodway, in Arkansas and Louisiana, to carry floods from the neighborhood of the mouth of the Arkansas River to the mouth of the Red River. The third was the Atchafalaya Floodway from near the Red River to the Gulf, west of New Orleans, a route only half as long as the main channel of the Mississippi. Instead of being raised three feet like other levees, the "fuse plug" levees at the mouths of these floodways were left at the old level so floods would wash over them. Still a fourth protection was devised, the Bonnet Carre Spillway not far above New Orleans, to pour flood waters out of the main Mississippi channel into Lake Pontchartrain which is virtually an arm of the Gulf. Finally the whole river was shortened 100 miles by cutting off numerous loops and meanders, so that the flood waters would go down faster instead of piling up.

The present flood in part foiled these plans. It was not the superflood planned for. Most of the big tributaries, such as the White, Arkansas and Ouachita Rivers, were below record heights. But the Ohio was far above its highest record made in 1913, and since the Ohio enters the Mississippi higher than all the others, the Army's flood control works from Cairo to the White River were receiving a much more severe test than the Army's superflood contemplated.

For that reason the Mississippi levees just below Cairo were in great danger. For that reason Memphis expected a flood 5 to 10 ft. above all previous records. For that reason 50,000 refugees from the lowlands were streaming into Memphis. Down at New Orleans the Bonnet Carre Spillway was opened two days before the water rose high enough to flow through it. First break in the Mississippi's walls came in a secondary levee at Bessie, Tenn., a few miles from Tiptonville, sent the flood surging across to cut off a bend in the river threatening little damage unless the onrush should weaken the levee on the Missouri side. From Cairo down, engineers held their breath, for the hump of the flood was yet to come.

Conclusive evidence that the U. S. was having a real flood came from Shanghai. Grateful Chinese decided to raise $60,000 to send to the U. S. for flood relief.

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