CATASTROPHE: Hell & High Water

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Even so. when the Ohio rushed down on Cairo, Ill. at the junction of the Mississippi with 57 ft. of water, almost a foot above the record level, Army engineers decided to use force to disband armed farmers who were preventing them from blasting out a protective "fuse plug" to route floodwaters through the Birds Point-New Madrid floodway. Prolonged and abnormal local rains had already sunk Arkansas farther into its gumbo, raised the waters of many a Mississippi tributary. Little Rock reported that twelve State highways were out of use. Big Slough levee gave way and thousands of acres of rich Greene County were flooded. Army Engineers tried to save the St. Francis River levees in Missouri, but in the face of rising water or- dered their 1,500 workers and their families to flee for their lives. At Blytheville, Ark. guards were posted on the Mississippi levees with orders to "shoot to kill" if any Tennesseean crossed the river to dynamite the levee to save his own land. The Tennessee militia was posted as usual on its side to keep Arkansans and Missourians from doing the opposite thing. "Stupid!" While Rear Admiral Gary T. Grayson of the Red Cross launched a drive for $4,000,000 for flood sufferers, while Harry Hopkins put 40.000 WPA workers on rescue and relief work, while President Roosevelt mobilized Army, Navy, Coast Guard, CCC and announced that he was "taking personal charge" of the Government's relief forces, one voice raucously raised the question: How did it happen? At Memphis this week Army Engineers expect the Mississippi to reach the 53-ft. level. In the epochal 1927 flood, than which the nation had yet to see worse, the water was only 45.6 ft. at Memphis. Yet last week Memphis was not badly worried, because in the past eight years the Army's brains and Congressional generosity have provided the Mississippi with a flood control system whose limits will supposedly never be approached. Why, stormed Indiana's Representative Glenn Griswold, was not something like that done about the Ohio? It was "stupid," said he, to build levees on the Mississippi to hold floods which rose and did their first damage on the Ohio. "It seems to me," said this Democratic member of the House Flood Control Committee, "that Congressmen from the South have been less interested in Mississippi flood control as a problem than in having flood control funds spent in their own section. I argued for six years for flood control on the upper streams that feed the Ohio and drain into the Mississippi before we finally got it into a bill which passed last session." Unfortunately, the bill to which Congressman Griswold referred was the $320,000,000 Omnibus Flood Control bill for which Congress failed to vote an appropriation. Last week chances were strong that Congressman Griswold and the rest of the Ohio River Valley would soon learn what Southerners learned in 1927: that the best means of getting Federal flood control money is to have a good flood.