CATASTROPHE: Flood Continued

(2 of 4)

Acadians. The story of Melville illustrates the tenacity with which the people in the area now being flooded cling to their homes. Most of them are Acadians—of old French and Spanish stock, few speaking English. They are (in the words of Herbert C. Hoover) "as much like French peasants as one dot is like another." Many of them wear French peasant costumes; have their shoes peg-nailed by a community shoemaker, his last held between his knees; eat hoe-cakes of home-ground corn meal, baked over live coals on three-legged iron spiders. Unable to realize that the present flood is the greatest in the history of the Mississippi, hating the thought of herding into refugee camps, they cling to their homes and threaten to add great loss of life to the other disasters of the flood. One farmer is said to have been "rescued" six times from a flooded home to which he has each time returned.

Mr. Hoover has said: "These Acadians are a wonderful people and they love this Evangeline country of theirs with all their heart and soul. Very few speak English and they are as proud as the forefathers who settled the Sugar Bowl 200 years ago. We are finding it the toughest sort of a job to convince them that when they go to a concentration camp they do not become objects of charity. They stay behind until the flood is in sight and even then they hesitate to take to the high places.

"Thousands of them are in the line of flood waters . . . and they are proving our biggest problem; but we are going to save them whether they like it or not."

Ten Lives. Despite the Acadians indifference to their danger, however, only ten lives are definitely known to have been lost in Louisiana, though rumor has listed the dead at more than 100. Nine of the dead belonged to one family, a widowed woman and her eight children. Caught as the flood entered Plaucheville, the Widow Dupré fled with her children to the second story of her home. The water poured into the house, reached the second story, continued to rise. A rescue boat found the entire family huddled together, drowned.

The other death came when one Tony Pitilalia and his son were caught as a span of the Texas & Pacific bridge connecting Melville with the east bank of the Atchafalaya was washed away. The boy was rescued but Mr. Pitilalia was carried off, drowned.

Thousands of refugees have been taken by rescue boats from housetops, from crumbling levees, from treetops.