CATASTROPHE: Yellow Waters

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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.