The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish by Elise Blackwell

Author:Elise Blackwell [Blackwell, Elise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Published: 2007-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

Often the history we might learn from is long forgotten. Other times, the past is so recent that we learn the wrong lesson.

In 1927, people could well remember 1922, and nowhere better than in New Orleans. Though engineers trumpeted aspects of the 1922 flood as evidence that the Mississippi River would soon be confined, seventy thousand people—many of them in Cypress and neighboring parishes—had been left homeless that year.

Waves had splashed over the tops of levees in New Orleans, where almost half a million people lived with no means of evacuation. While newspapers and city officials declared the city safe, in the already world-famous French Quarter sand boils erupted more than three hundred feet from the levee, shattering cobblestones and spewing small volcanoes of muddy water.

Then, some miles south of the city, a levee responsible for holding one of the river’s sharp bends and taking the brunt of its current gave way. This crevasse opened a scant five miles from an inlet of the Gulf of Mexico and in the precise position of an artificial spillway that had been proposed but—under the influence of those advocating a levees-only policy—never constructed.

Though the 1922 crevasse took little human life, it forged a wall of water fifteen hundred feet wide and more than one hundred feet high—a wall of water higher than any building in New Orleans at that time. Much of two southern parishes was flooded, while in the city the river fell swiftly.

The Mississippi River Commission stated that the newly homeless had been victims either of backwater flooding or of substandard levees. The solution it hit upon was to bring all levees into line with the latest government specifications. As for backwater flooding: it was not wholly avoidable, and modern practicality would certainly have to include solid evacuation plans for rural people.

Meanwhile, some of the country’s brightest but not necessarily most vocal engineers took away another lesson: human activities, including the closure of some of the river’s natural outlets, were making the river more dangerous, particularly to Mississippi and Louisiana, at a time when more people than ever were living in its reach. “Our arrogance is making us vulnerable,” one said.

Those who ruled New Orleans—and no one more than those who ruled with the practical power of money rather than the weaker authority of office—drew another conclusion altogether. The way they saw it, their city and its expanding wealth had been saved by a levee break to the south. More than one powerful man smiled at the thought that there now existed a last resort.

Once imagined, a last resort becomes not only possible but increasingly likely. Once imagined, it is a contingency that can be planned around. It can even be planned for.

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