:Whopper of a good (horrible) story!

Rising Tide

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America 
by

John M. Barry

How is this possible, that a big old book about the politics and people of the great Mississippi flood of 1927, could be so darn good? Okay, there were a few too many 'floating cows' and cold, scared people perched on levees waiting for boats that never came. But the whole story of the mismanagement of the great river, all mixed with politics and racism and engineers who made decisions based on profits rather than facts, was great! It should have been subtitled, the Documentary of a Disaster. Or, more accurately, how mankind's meddling created a disaster.

It started in the 1850's and 60s, when The Army Corp of Engineers was led by a flawed scientist named Andrew Atkinson Humphreys. He took the time to collect the data that would allow him to make informed decisions about managing the river, then ignored it all. One of his proposals for managing the river was so out of touch with reality that,

Privately, even some Army engineers were aghast at Humpreys' position. One was Barnard, the sole dissenting vote...[who said] the plan submitted to the board simply ignored the engineering science of the present....The incompetence from first to last with which the thing has been handled by the [Corps] has thrown it irrecovably into the hands of politicians."

Politicians set up a sort of power play between the Corp and civilian engineers, with Humphreys pitched against the famous bridge builder James Buchanon Eads and the scientist engineer Charles Ellet. Their battles made for good reading but very bad outcomes, and the decisions ended up in the hands of the "Mississippi River Commission"--neither a scientific organization nor an engineering one, but a bureaucracy.

The commission took positions, and the positions became increasingly petrified and rigid. Unfortunately, these positions combined the worst, not the best, of the ideas of Eads, Ellet and Humphreys.
Both Eads and Humphreys opposed outlets. Ellet proposed them. Ellet was right. But the commission opposed outlets.
Both Eads and Humpreys opposed building reservoirs. Ellet proposed them. Ellet was right. but the commission opposed reservoirs.
Eads wanted to build cutoffs. Humphreys and Ellet opposed them. Eads was right. The commission followed Humphreys and Ellet.

And in the end,  with outlets, reservoirs and cutoffs all being cast aside, the commission decided to use levees and only levees, a position "violently rejected" by all three men. So over the next decades, levees were built higher and higher and natural outlets were closed off. when the rains came, the Mississippi had nowhere to go but up.

There is no sight like the rising Mississippi. One cannot look at it without awe, or watch it rise and press against the levees without fear. It grows darker, angrier, dirtier; eddies and whirlpools erupt on its surface; it thickens with trees, rooftops, the occasional body of a mule. Its currents roil more, flow swifter, pummel its bands harder. When a section of riverbank caves into the river, acres of land at a time collapse, snapping trees with the great cracking sounds of heavy artillery. On the water the sound carries for miles.

Unlike a human enemy, the river has no weaknesses, makes no mistakes, is perfect; unlike a human enemy, it will find and exploit any weakness.