Word: mississippis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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SUCH A GORGEOUS Kid Like Me is a funny movie. Now, The 400 Blows was a zany movie. Shoot the Piano Player was a really zany movie. But this is about as zany overall as Mississippi Mermaid. I laughed, in spots, as raucously as you can laugh in a nearly empty screening room. And I was swept, protesting, into a story I considered not only tired, but even maudlin in spots. The problem is that I, weaned as an appreciative viewer of foreign films on Truffaut, have come to expect perhaps too much of him. There is the inevitable disappointment...
With that, the Mississippi itself became a sullen, swollen giant, toppling levees, inundating homes and farm lands and roaring through diversionary dikes. In St. Louis the river peaked at 39.8 ft.-its highest level since...
Last week's flood ranked as one of the river's great disasters. It caused the death of 19 Mississippi Valley residents, destroyed an estimated $150 million worth of property and covered 7,000,000 acres-an area slightly larger than Maryland. President Nixon ordered the Coast Guard Reserve to help with rescue and evacuation-the first time it has been mobilized in peacetime. Everywhere, the battle was being waged with rowboats, shovels and sand. On Kaskaskia Island, smack in the middle of the Mississippi 75 miles south of St. Louis, college students teamed with inmates from nearby...
Throughout March the watershed states of the Mississippi River system received as much as three times their average rainfall. There were no spectacular storms-just day after day of precipitation, until the earth, already saturated by abnormally heavy winter rains and early spring thaws, could absorb no more. "We were one-inched to death," explained Allen Pearson, director of the National Severe Storm Forecast Center. The runoff gradually distended the Mississippi's major tributaries-in particular the Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and lower Missouri-until they jumped their banks last week...
...Mississippi's highest waters bore down on Memphis and points south, the levee system was holding up well, but the danger remained. "What concerns us," said a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Miss., "is that this is a long, slow crest. The odds against being spared heavy April rains go up every day. We are hoping that we can get through the next couple of weeks without a big downpour." That hope seemed dashed early last weekend as rains began to pelt parts of the lower river valley and flash flood warnings went...