On the Coldwater

At Birdie a white woman bore a child atop a cotton shed. Mother & babe froze to death. At Crenshaw a blackamoor born in a boxcar died of exposure and the bodies of six negroes were washed up. At Sledge a single telephone was left in commission. Hip-deep in icy water, Mayor Prysock chattered into it: "A thousand persons are marooned in this area, and we can't reach them. We must have help today. We have to bust a lane through the ice to get our little boats through. We need big boats with motors."

Rising in northern Mississippi a few miles from Tennessee, the Coldwater River flows about 125 mi. southwest to join the Tallahatchie River near Marks. About 100 yd. wide, it ordinarily creeps lazily through a hot, flat lowland littered with the shacks and cotton patches of poor whites and Negroes. Last week it burst its banks, spread out some 30 miles, plunged down its course like a miniature tidal wave. Misery piled on misery for scrawny, ill-clothed natives when bitter cold (6DEG to 12DEG) came knifing through their bones, caking the flood's backwash with a two-inch crust of ice.

By hundreds shivering refugees trudged into Sledge, Dundee, Sarah, Savage. Eighteen motorboats were rushed to Sledge, sent putt-putting out to pluck shouting, praying countrymen off roof tops, out of trees. The same rains which swelled the Coldwater flooded nearby streams in Tennessee and Arkansas. A farmer's wife near Bells, Tenn. saw her husband and son drown, piled two chairs atop her bed, perched there for three days. By week's end an estimated 25,000 persons were marooned, 27 were known dead and the flood had shown no signs of falling.

In Memphis last week, as snow piled high along the Mississippi River's northern watershed. President William Henry Dick of the Mississippi River Flood Control Association renewed his prediction of last month (TIME. Dec. 24), declared a lower Mississippi flood equal to that of 1913-14 "practically assured" for next spring.

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