CATASTROPHE: At New Orleans

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Over a grass-covered levee on the banks of the Mississippi at Poydras plantation, twelve miles south of New Orleans, hovered last week a U. S. naval airplane. From the plane dropped three white flags, each six feet square. At this signal came a dull, earth-deadened roar from 48 charges of dynamite, planted in eight rows of holes, six feet apart. Diving through the cloud of smoke that lifted over the levee, the aviator vexed dynamiters by holding his nose in disdain—as a spectacle, the explosion was a "dud." Sturdy, solid, the Poydras levee had not given way, the expected breach had failed to appear. But after five more discharges, using 1,500 pounds of dynamite, the concrete-like earth finally crumbled. Through the gap, with the roar of a dozen freight trains, the Mississippi poured. Next day 3,000 more pounds of dynamite were exploded. Ultimately the levee-break was widened to a 1,200-foot gap. Engineers believed that water drained through the Poydras cut would lower the Mississippi flood crest two to three feet, so that levees protecting New Orleans would not give way when high-water reached the city. When Oramel Hinkley Simpson, Governor of Louisiana, wrote his official announcement: "I do hereby declare that a public emergency exists and an artificial break in the levee of the Mississippi River is hereby ordered to be created . . .," he wrote also a death-sentence for two Louisiana parishes, St. Bernard and Plaquemines. With an area of some 50 square miles, a population variously estimated at from 3,500 to 5,000, these two delta parishes, lying almost at sea level between New Orleans and the Gulf, were turned into a yellow lake by the Poydras cut. Along highways to New Orleans, in trucks and wagons, on horses and mules, many walking, trooped the inhabitants of the doomed district. Strange folk they are, known as "Cajans," speaking a dialect half-French, half-Spanish. Some small truck-farmers, peace-loving, quiet, made no protest; others, marshland trappers, illiterate, isolated, clutched long rifles, cursed the "fat officials" in the "so-great" city who had ordered their homes flooded. But all departed, and their footprints were washed out by rising waters. Soon only an occasional roof top remained above the muddy waste. Crawling southward at the rate of a mile an hour, the crest of the Mississippi flood last week spread through Arkansas and Louisiana the desolation that last fortnight it had brought to Kentucky and Tennessee. Some 600 feet of levee at South Bend, Ark., crumbled, water rushed through toward 30 towns in southeastern Arkansas driving 50,000 refugees before it. Levees "went out" near Glasscock, and Vidalia, northern Louisiana, opposite Natchez, leaving 3,000 square miles of land occupied by 200,000 persons in the path of the uncontrollable waters. Property damage already done by the still-menacing river was beyond estimation. More than 6,000,000 acres were inundated, more than 300,000 were homeless and figures were being daily revised upward. A conservative estimate placed the dead at 350, but many of the thousands listed as missing were feared to have been drowned. Secretary of Commerce Herbert C. Hoover, in charge of the flood district, appointed onetime (1920-24) Governor of Louisiana John Milliken Parker to head relief work in Louisiana, traveled tirelessly up and down the river. Once his boat was