Submitted by: Submitted by vette39180
Views: 652
Words: 522
Pages: 3
Category: US History
Date Submitted: 03/17/2011 05:54 PM
The great Mississippi River flood of 1927 was one of the worst natural disasters in American history. When the rain first started to fall in the summer of 1926, residents in the Mississippi River Basin expected an average weather season, but the rain continued to fall, and after awhile, it seemed it would never stop. By September, the Mississippi's tributaries in Kansas and Iowa were swollen to capacity. In the winter of 1926-27 the rains were so heavy that on the tributaries of the Mississippi the water had overflowed the banks, causing floods to the west in Oklahoma and Kansas, to the east in Illinois and Kentucky. On New Year's Day of 1927, the Cumberland River at Nashville topped levees at 56.2 feet (17 m).
The first levee break occurred a few miles south of Elaine, Arkansas, on March 29. On April 15, 1927 15 inches (380 mm) of rain fell in 18 hours. This rain caused flooding which overtook the levees causing the Mounds Landing to break with more than double the water volume of Niagara Falls. The Mississippi River broke out of its levee system in 145 places. Over the next six weeks, more than 50 more levee breaks stretching from Illinois to Louisiana flooded 28,500 square miles that were home to more than 931,000 people (see map) and damaged 137,000 buildings. Heavy spring rains then added insult to injury, causing a second major flood in June.
The flood affected Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. It covered 29,000 square miles, an area about the size of New England, destroying crops and farms, killing as many as 1,000 people, and forcing 700,000 more from their homes. Arkansas was hardest hit, with 14% of its territory covered by floodwaters. By May 1927, the Mississippi River below Memphis, Tennessee, reached a width of 60 miles (97 km). At a time when the entire budget of the federal government was barely $3 billion, the flood caused an estimated $1 billion in damage....