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Otago Daily Times, Issue 20087, 2 May 1927, Page 8

THE MISSISSIPPI FLOOD. The reports concerning the Mississippi floods seem to disclose a situation of accentuated seriousness. Tho great river, exceptionally - swollen by heavy rains throughout its extensive valley, has assumed a strength and violence against which tho protective works, laboriously created and maintained over a long period, have proved quite inadequate. Despite extraordinary efforts to reinforce them, the levees have yielded in many places before the fierce assault of the waters. Tho general spectacle is being presented of the adoption of desperate measures to avert still worse consequences than those already recorded, and there is no assurance that the worst is yet over. The flood has assumed for the United States all the aspects of a great national calamity. Apart from the loss of life the destruction of property is, and will be, enormous, though accurate estimates on this point, with the damage still going on, are as yet out of the question. It is stated that 300,000 persons are homeless, and pitiful accounts are given of the plight of those who have seen their homes and all their possessions swept away by the remorseless waters. The latest cabled messages reflect vividly tho position of New Orleans. It was recognised from the first that this important city and seaport, virtually the whole of it below the river level, was bound ultimately to receive the full force of the downward sweep of tho flood waters, and strenuous efforts have been made to avert tho danger. It was for the protection of New Orleans, then a new settlement, that tho first levee was constructed on the Mississippi over two hundred years ago. To-day New Orleans is a town with some 400,000 inhabitants, and its jeopardy constitutes a dramatic inciciont. Tho expedient has been resorted to of dynamiting great breaches in the levees at certain points in the hope of relieving the flood pressure, and thus reducing the danger to the city itself at the expense of low-lying adjacent districts. This has involved a sad devastation of holdings to which tho owners have clung with a pitiful tenacity, but there seems to be no certainty that the effect will be to save Now Orleans itself from disaster. It is reported in one message that the water is rising rapidly in tho streets of tho city. A remarkable feature of these untoward happenings on the Mississippi has consisted in the tension created by the gradual but relentless manner in which the waters have continued to rise from day to day, so that even now it is doubtful whether the flood has reached its full height. In the light of the millions spent upon

protective works on the Mississippi in the past, of the results of previous inundations, of the lose now being brought about by a flood which may rank as the worst yet recorded, and of the enormous cost that will inevitably be involved in ensuring safety in the future the Americans may almost be beginning to doubt whether, after all, they are to be envied the possession of the greatest river in the world.