The tragic disaster New Orleans is now experiencing is not exactly unprecedented in our nation's history. There are some lessons to be learned about what happened in 1927 in the Great Mississippi Flood. Here is what the Wikipedia states about this event:
The Great Mississippi Flood in 1927 was the most destructive flood in United States history.In the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 the Mississippi River broke out of its levee system in 145 places and flooded 27,000 square miles or about 16,570,627 acres (70,000 km²). The area was inundated up to a depth of 30 feet (10 m). The flood caused over $400 million in damages and killed 246 people in seven states.
The flood affected Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee with Arkansas being hardest hit with 13% of its territory covered by floodwaters....
The flood began when heavy rains pounded the central basin of the Mississippi in the summer of 1926. By September the Mississippi's tributaries in Kansas and Iowa were swollen to capacity. On New Year's day of 1927 the Cumberland River at Nashville topped levees at 56.2 feet (17 m).
By May of 1927 the Mississippi River below Memphis, Tennessee was a watery oval up to 60 miles wide (100 km).....
By August 1927 the flood subsided. During the disaster 700,000 people were displaced, including 330,000 African-Americans who were moved to 154 relief camps. Many African-Americans were detained and forced to labor at gunpoint during flood relief efforts. The aftermath of the flood was one factor in the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities. The flood resulted in a great cultural output as well, spawning much folklore and inspiring a lot of music (for instance, Charlie Patton wrote numerous songs about the flood).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mississippi_Flood_of_1927
Photos from the disaster have an uncanny resemblance to the present state of things in New Orleans:
Note that in those days they didn't have helicopters to rescue people from rooftops. Although the 1927 flood was not caused by a hurricane or affected New Orleans, it was an enormous multi-state catastrophe like the present crisis, precipitated by massive levee breaks like the current disaster in New Orleans, and most striking of all -- it caused a huge exodus of refugees numbering in the hundreds of thousands in a mass evacuation of affected areas, many of whom were poor blacks who lost everything in the flood. Many of these moved permanently to the northern cities and other places where they were located to. The since_1968.com blog has an interesting comparison between the situation today and what happened in 1927. Here are some of the long-range ramifications of the Mississippi flood:
John M. Barry writes about the Flood and its effects in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. Then, as now, poor African-Americans bore the brunt of the flood’s punishment. According to Barry, the flood changed America in at least four notable ways:http://since1968.com/article/122/rising-tide-katrina-and-the-flood-of-1927
- The Flood helped put Herbert Hoover in the White House. Hoover, who prior to the flood had been the Secretary of Commerce under Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, was appointed head of the relief effort. He was able to parlay his heightened popularity to win the Republican nomination for the Presidency in 1928, and from there took the White House.
- The Flood marked the split between the Republican Party and African-Americans. According to Barry, Hoover exploited the trust of African-American leaders during his tenure as head of the relief effort and abandoned that constituency once he became President.
- The Flood set the stage for the New Deal. Prior to the flood, there was no national consensus that large public works and employment programs should be funded by the Federal government. But the government’s massive reconstruction and employment programs in the wake of the flood set a precedent for Roosevelt’s vastly larger programs a decade later.
- Finally, the Flood prompted the African-American exodus from the agrarian South to the industrial North. This migration is best documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent The Promised Land.
I wonder if our nation's leaders, FEMA, etc. will reflect on the refugee crisis of 1927 to see if there are any lessons to be learned about how to handle hundreds of thousands of people who no longer have homes and cannot return to their neighborhoods to rebuild for at least some time. I have heard it said that the present refugee crisis is unprecedented in our nation's history, and it certainly is something that hasn't happened for generations, but still....something quite similar has happened in our history, so what can we learn from it? How well did Chicago, Atlanta, and other cities absorb the new population of homeless and poor? How well did the federal government provide for them, both in short-term needs and longer-term employment/health/housing problems? It seems like history such as this has had little effect on planning policy. For one thing, the lessons of the massive levee failure of 1927 did not help the Army Corps of Engineers secure enough federal funds to get the New Orleans levee system in the state it should be. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 instigated the plan to improve the levees and they were supposed to be completed in 1975, but to this day they were not built to the level they should have been....
Just as the 1927 flood led to far-reaching changes in the federal attitude towards infrastructure programs and relief efforts, so will this crisis likely lead (hopefully) to a more organized and better funded system of improving this country's infrastructure and security. I don't know, maybe an emphasis on waging war overseas might become less politically advantageous than emphasizing a "New Deal" type of approach towards funding -- effectively (!) -- public works and getting our act together in responding to emergencies (one could dream). Our current administration has from time to time bandied around the scary thought of terrorists attacking our cities with weapons of mass destruction, with massive casualties. Such a disaster has finally occurred, tho not instigated by terrorists, and the federal response has been far from what we have expected it to be. All the reorganization of FEMA and other agencies into the new Department of Homeland Security, so focused as it as to threats from abroad, has seemingly not helped in getting relief and help quickly to those who need it. This should be a wakeup call for our nation's political structure -- from the local level up to the federal level -- to realize that much work still needs to be done. If the problem here is the failure of local authorities to work together with federal agencies and authorities, then this is an opportunity for us to figure out new ways to get the whole system to work together efficiently in times of crisis. On 9/11, we were lucky to have a Rudy Giuliani who at least knew New York inside and out, knew what the needs were, and had a good sense of how to work local police, fire, and other municipal departments with federal and state agencies and leaders. Not many mayors are up to this challenge, so perhaps there should be someone else at the local level with training in crisis management, or maybe some other solution, but whatever it is, it is my hope that our leaders will take advantage of this tragedy to learn how to better respond to events such as these and how to prevent making bad situations worse. Anyway, I digress....
The 1927 flood inspired lots of music on the event, particularly by black musicians hardest hit by the event and those passing on the memory. One may think of Charlie Patton's "High Water Everywhere", Blind Lemon Jefferson "Rising High Water Blues", and Memphis Minnie's "When the Levee Breaks". The latter song, popularized by Led Zeppelin, has been on my mind quite a bit lately....the lyrics evoke many aspects of the disaster which uncannily have been repeated today:
"When The Levee Breaks"
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break, [X2]
When the levee breaks I'll have no place to stay.
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, [X2]
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.
Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home,
You don't know which way to go?
If you're goin' down South
They got no work to do,
If you don't know about Chicago.
Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
Now, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.
All last night sat on the levee and moaned, [X2]
Thinkin' about me baby and my happy home.
Going, going to Chicago... Going to Chicago... Sorry but I can't take you...
Going down... going down now... going down....
Instead of "Chicago", today its "Houston". But in many aspects, it's much the same story again.