Not only did the South seem perennially behind but it seemed to need repeated fixing. The Harlem Renaissance spokesman Alain Locke, for example, had in 1925 described the northward migration of southern blacks to be not only a geographical move from countryside to city, but also a temporal leap forward “from Medieval America to modern.” Inhabitants of the Delta in 1927-white planters, but even more so poor whites and African Americans-were imagined by the rest of the country to be historically retrograde, caught in “Lost Cause” nostalgia, outmoded Christian fundamentalism, or feudal social and labor relations. The media coverage gave citizens outside the flood zone, especially in the North and West, a great deal of time to think out loud about the distressed South. This slow, months-long disaster occurred in an era of a fast new medium-radio-and became intensely consuming for Americans, who had never before experienced a virtual disaster in something close to real time. The black-and-white photograph of the blast, with earthworks catapulted skyward, looks like a scene from the Great War in Europe. The flood’s most dramatic moment occurred on April 29, when authorities-hoping to protect New Orleans-dynamited the levee 13 miles below the Crescent City at Caernarvon in order to flood the relatively less populated Acadian region of St. Floodwaters did not fully drain until the end of the summer. In all, water covered 27,000 square miles, land in seven states where about a million people lived 13 major crevasses occurred roughly 637,000 people became homeless, approximately 555,000 of whom were racial or ethnic minorities somewhere between 250 and 1,000 people died and financially, direct property losses totaled $250 to 500 million, while indirect losses brought that figure up to $1 billion. After extreme weather swept from the plains states to the Ohio River valley in fall 1926, levees began bursting in the Lower Mississippi Valley in March of ’27 and kept breaking through May. history-as an industrial disaster partly of their own making. It was harder still for Northerners to see the news of 1927-the most destructive river flood in U.S. It was hard for Northerners to imagine the South as modern. To think of the South from the distance of Manhattan was somehow to think back-back to 1868, back to a storied river battle in 1863, or maybe all the way back, to an “ancient” time when chivalrous men tilted at dragons. Through the curtain-like trees, the 1927 viewer-perhaps a Manhattanite drinking her Sunday morning coffee-peeped at a gallant steamboat, a columned Great House, and a close-up scene of rural black people caught in a picturesque predicament of floating roofs and tugging mules she saw, even as she looked at an image of catastrophe, a tableau bedecked in plantation nostalgia.

Pink was only flooded on Maand yellow was only flooded on March 13, 2019.On May 1, 1927, the New York Times announced: “Once more war is on between the mighty old dragon that is the Mississippi River and his ancient enemy, man.” Illustrating the story was a reprint of an 1868 Currier & Ives lithograph called “High Water in the Mississippi,” to which had been added the phrase “In Days Gone By.” These are not only the rivers and lakes, but as well some plots. In dark colors you see those areas, which were permanently flooded over the three acquisitions February 17, March 1, and March 13, 2019. We can combine different layers to generate new map products, that shows the evolution of the flooding over the time in different colors. The big advantage of SAR data is, that you have stable time-series, because it is independent from atmospheric disturbances. At the same time plants that are flooded might tolerate this for a certain time until they die back.Īlready in Februwe see some flooded land and we still see it March 13, 2019. The longer the water stays at a certain place, the higher is probably the level and the longer the farmer cannot use it for cultivation. The flood took place over a certain period and has a certain temporal dynamic. This is important because it tells us something about the severity of the flooding.

Mississippi river flood maps