Hell & High Water

Down, down, down all last fortnight rain poured on the U. S. from Arkansas to Pennsylvania. In Missouri and Illinois it fell two inches at a time. On southern Ohio half a foot was dumped in 48 hours. Up, up, up last week rose the long, wide rivers of the Ohio and central Mississippi systems, the brown, frothy water creeping up the banks, lipping up the sides of the levees, spilling over the top and then surging and thundering into the river towns, killing 58 people, routing 550,000 from their homes, destroying millions of dollars worth of property in an area of 20,000 sq. mi. With the water 8 ft. above flood stage at Pittsburgh, 10 at Wheeling, 21 at Cincinnati at week's end (see map), the still-rising 1937 flood had already taken more lives than the 1936 inundation of the upper Ohio and Susquehanna slopes. For size and damage it was a far greater national disaster. In the lower Ohio Valley there never had been such a flood. The reason for last year's flood was that the winter was too cold. The snow stayed on the ground too deep and too long. When it suddenly thawed, the water ran off in a rush because the ground was still frozen. The reason for last week's flood was that the Eastern winter had not been cold enough. Instead of remaining on the ground as snow and draining gradually, the winter precipitation had fallen as cold rain, millions of tons of it, to make a wet and gloomy hell of high water as the swollen torrent swept 900 mi. south-west through ten sodden States. Pennsylvania got off comparatively easy this year. The citizens of Johnstown, which can never forget 1889, got worried when the Conemaugh went to five feet above normal after a 72-hr, rain, but few Johnstownians took the precaution of moving to higher ground. Pittsburgh's "Golden Triangle," the downtown district where the Monongahela and Allegheny meet to form the Ohio, got its feet wet near the river banks, but there was no likelihood of a repetition of last March's 46-ft. flood stage. West Virginia bore the flood's brunt in the upper Ohio valley. Rising 2 in. an hour toward a 47-ft. crest, the river submerged residential Wheeling Island and the Red Cross ordered its 10,000 inhabitants evacuated. Bus and trolley service was virtually abandoned and, with mills crippled and mines flooded, 30,000 were jobless in the area. In the 100 mr. between Parkersburg and Huntington, thousands were driven from their homes. Not a store was open on Point Pleasant's Main Street as trucks hauled everything movable back into the hills. Synagogs and churches were turned into rescue stations and refugee barracks. The Baltimore & Ohio R. R. suspended operation on its Ohio Division. Ohio.

In Ohio the river which gives the State its name went hog wild, first broke all records established in the 1913 flood, then proceeded to top the even more disastrous inundations of 1884. Full of foam, mud and debris, the Scioto River swept down on Portsmouth, which seven years ago threw up a $750,000 sea wall of steel & concrete to keep the Scioto and Ohio away from its doors. Last year to the 62-ft. wall was added a supplementing levee of sandbags and Portsmouth stayed dry. This year the flood was not to be cheated.

Thursday at n p. m. City Manager Frank Sheehan ordered sirens and factory whistles to be sounded and sewers were opened in the lower sections of Portsmouth so that the town could flood itself in self-defense. The National Guard and other relief agencies began sending 25,000 inhabitants to Chillicothe and Columbus. "The Bottoms'' of Cincinnati is the wholesale and tenement district from which the rest of the town, perched like Rome on seven hills, lifts the hem of its municipal garment. Last week, after an unprecedented rainfall of ten in. in ten days, as the river stage went to 71, then 73, then 78 ft., The Bottoms was under from one to 20 ft. of water. Schools in the rest of town were closed so 40,000 homeless could be bedded, fed and inoculated against typhoid. Not all The Bottoms' occupants got away safely. A house with five screaming people in it went sailing down the Ohio as onlookers stood helpless on the bank. The Norfolk & Western abandoned service when floods east of the city washed out the right of way at Clear Creek, near the Little Miami River. Other lines were soon out of commission because the fine new Union Station is in old Mill Creek Valley and tracks were deeply submerged. An even greater danger threatened the waterfront when oil tanks in Mill Creek Valley tore loose from their foundations, began floating around and slopping their fluid on the rising waters.

Somehow a fire started and at week's end Cincinnati's firemen, police, citizens and even workhouse inmates were fighting not only flood but fire on a two-mile front. By vote of the city council. City Manager C. A. Dykstra was given dictatorial powers to deal with the situation as he thought best. Property damage: $5,000,000. Indiana. Evansville, Funnyman Joe Cook's hometown, was made base of the Coast Guard's relief forces. While 40 horses were rescued from the Dade Park race track, amphibians roared in from the Atlantic coast and radio-equipped surf boats arrived from the Chicago station. Indianapolis diked itself in after a body was seen floating down the White River. Kentucky's Green, Kentucky and other rivers, fed by continuing downpours, were still rising at week's end. Louisville was the hardest hit city in the whole flood area. Sitting on comparatively level ground where the Ohio drops 26 ft. in two mi., Louisville watched its west end sink under the yellow torrent which drove 200,000 from their homes. Telephone service was disrupted. The city was put on a two-hour water ration each day. As sewage backed up in the municipal disposal system, two typhoid inoculation stations were established. Bus and trolley service was abandoned and only the Southern Ry. continued running out of town. Electric generating plants by the river faltered, then quit on Sunday night, plunging a city of 330,000 into darkness. All police were put on 24-hr, duty and companies of National Guardsmen were sent to help them keep the peace. With the water rising 2 ft. an hour and the rain still falling, Governor Albert Benjamin ("Happy'') Chandler telephoned President Roosevelt that the emergency had reached such proportions that Federal troops were needed. For stricken Louisville he declared martial law. The whole nation was given front row seats at the Ohio valley's tragedy through Louisville radio station WHAS.

Hooked to a national circuit, WHAS was busy day and night directing local relief workers for miles up and down the river. Frankfort, where 1.500 families took to the hills when the Kentucky river flooded the State capital, was reported to be the scene of the catastrophe's most brutal and piteous event. As the water rose in the Frankfort Reformatory. 2,900 panic-stricken prisoners began fighting.

First everybody fought the guards, 25 swimming out into the river and 24 swimming back when shots were fired over their heads. Then the Negroes fought the whites. National Guardsmen withdrew outside the prison walls, announcing that twelve prisoners were dead and that all had "absolutely gone mad." Governor Chandler had previously putted through the gates in an outboard motorboat. "Get us out of here, Happy!" the inmates yelled. "We're gonna drown if yon don't!" "Happy" yelled back: "It's a hell of a mess, boys, but I'm going to get you out and take care of you!" He then telephoned Washington, for not only troops but also doctors from the U. S. Public Health Service to help set up a prison camp on the State Insane Asylum Grounds. Tennessee. The Cumberland, one of the nation's most picturesque streams, went ugly in Middle Tennessee. At Clarksville (pop. 9.200) the river reached an alltime high of 62 ft.. 24 ft. above flood stage.

Near Huntingdon. Clyde Davis, 35, fell out of an ambulance and drowned in the Obion River while taking his father to a hospital. Earl Kilgore. 35, was drowned when his car unset in a swollen creek. A drowned Negro was found in a Clarksville ditch. From Arkansas South-The Ohio basin's flood waters would not take full effect until this week.

Even so. when the Ohio rushed down on Cairo, Ill. at the junction of the Mississippi with 57 ft. of water, almost a foot above the record level, Army engineers decided to use force to disband armed farmers who were preventing them from blasting out a protective "fuse plug" to route floodwaters through the Birds Point-New Madrid floodway. Prolonged and abnormal local rains had already sunk Arkansas farther into its gumbo, raised the waters of many a Mississippi tributary. Little Rock reported that twelve State highways were out of use. Big Slough levee gave way and thousands of acres of rich Greene County were flooded. Army Engineers tried to save the St. Francis River levees in Missouri, but in the face of rising water or- dered their 1,500 workers and their families to flee for their lives. At Blytheville, Ark. guards were posted on the Mississippi levees with orders to "shoot to kill" if any Tennesseean crossed the river to dynamite the levee to save his own land. The Tennessee militia was posted as usual on its side to keep Arkansans and Missourians from doing the opposite thing. "Stupid!" While Rear Admiral Gary T. Grayson of the Red Cross launched a drive for $4,000,000 for flood sufferers, while Harry Hopkins put 40.000 WPA workers on rescue and relief work, while President Roosevelt mobilized Army, Navy, Coast Guard, CCC and announced that he was "taking personal charge" of the Government's relief forces, one voice raucously raised the question: How did it happen? At Memphis this week Army Engineers expect the Mississippi to reach the 53-ft. level. In the epochal 1927 flood, than which the nation had yet to see worse, the water was only 45.6 ft. at Memphis. Yet last week Memphis was not badly worried, because in the past eight years the Army's brains and Congressional generosity have provided the Mississippi with a flood control system whose limits will supposedly never be approached. Why, stormed Indiana's Representative Glenn Griswold, was not something like that done about the Ohio? It was "stupid," said he, to build levees on the Mississippi to hold floods which rose and did their first damage on the Ohio. "It seems to me," said this Democratic member of the House Flood Control Committee, "that Congressmen from the South have been less interested in Mississippi flood control as a problem than in having flood control funds spent in their own section. I argued for six years for flood control on the upper streams that feed the Ohio and drain into the Mississippi before we finally got it into a bill which passed last session." Unfortunately, the bill to which Congressman Griswold referred was the $320,000,000 Omnibus Flood Control bill for which Congress failed to vote an appropriation. Last week chances were strong that Congressman Griswold and the rest of the Ohio River Valley would soon learn what Southerners learned in 1927: that the best means of getting Federal flood control money is to have a good flood.

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