Rising Tide by John M. Barry

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

Great book about Mississippi river policies and great flood of 1927; helped elect Hoover.

To read this book post-Katrina gives a tremendous sense of perspective. The flood of 1927, which extended all the way from Southern Illinois through Missouri, Mississippi, and Louisianna, happened almost in slow motion with cascading events over weeks and months that were unstoppable. Unbelievably, New Orleans' city leaders made the cold hearted decision, which turned out to be unnecessary, to purposely flood certain poor parishes to save the heart of New Orleans, with the implicit approval of Washington DC. This is like watching Katrina unfold in forward motion over years of poor flood control policies, then with more graphic tension as the weeks of rising waters broke levees all the way down the Mississippi.

The book reads like a novel and impacts American history in peculiar ways. When Northwestern Mississippi fell to the floods, an 'instant' migration of unemployable African Americans fled north to settle in Chicago, changing the face of that area in less than a generation. The principal engineer sent by Washington DC to address the crisis was Herbert Hoover, who rode the national press recognition right into the White House. The evolution of New Orleans and its peculiar customs and politics is traced before and after this, pardon the pun, watershed event.

The final lesson is this. Mother nature eventually wins. Most engineers expect the Mississippi to cut a more efficient path to the sea in the next generation, despite any and all efforts to the contrary.

Reading this reminded me of reading "The Johnstown Flood" by McCullough (yep, the John Adams Author) as so many events unfolded in sequence ahead of time that eventually led to an immutable crisis.

Blog written later, Jan 2010