Word: flooding
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...these criticisms did the Army Engineers justice. The Army's flood-works were adapted from the plan submitted to Congress in 1927 by Major General Edgar Jadwin, Chief of Engineers. General Jadwin pointed out then that to reduce a Mississippi flood one foot meant holding out 7,000,000 to 11,000,000 acre-feet of water. If 8,000,000 acres of land were reforested and thereby .held back half an inch more water than would flow off farm land, a flood would be reduced just half an inch. On the question of building headwater reservoirs, Army Engineers...
Chief of Staff Malin Craig in Washington announced that he was ready if necessary to evacuate the entire Mississippi flood plain from Cairo to New Orleans. Major General Herbert J. Brees, commanding the Eighth Corps Area on the west bank of the Mississippi, was making preparations to evacuate eastern Arkansas and his troopers were busy setting up concentration camps. In the Fourth Corps Area, east of the Mississippi, Major General George Van Horn Moseley had an even bigger responsibility for on his bank are most of the big river cities, the once great steamboat towns: Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, New Orleans...
Responsibility. Quite as big as the Army's rescue job was its moral responsibility. It has been largely responsible for the spending of some $325,000,000 since the great flood of 1927, to make the valley flood-safe. Already last week criticisms of the Army's work were being heard. Some said that reforestation was more needed than the Army's levees, that reservoirs should have been built to control the floods at their source, on the headwaters of tributaries, instead of trying to deal with the floods after they were underway, that the Army...
...Army's flood control plan (General Jadwin's plan modified) was to provide protection from the maximum possible flood. Army Engineers and the Weather Bureau calculated this "superflood" by taking the maximum known flood of each of the Mississippi's great tributaries and assuming that they all hit the main river at once-which they have never done...
This required raising the levees an average of three feet from Cairo to the Gulf. But this was not all. The Mississippi, like most great rivers, has carved a channel sufficient to carry its ordinary waters. In flood times, if not artificially restricted, it spreads its waters over most of its alluvial valley. Levees make the floods higher by penning them in, and levees which are made of dirt cannot be built high enough to hold the whole flood in the river channel, for the subsoil would give way under the pressure, if not the levee itself. Hence when...