The Nineteen Twenty-Seven Flood: Who They Chose to Drown

By the spring of nineteen twenty-seven, the Mississippi River had been rising for months. The rains had begun the previous summer and had not stopped. By April, the river was at levels not seen in recorded history, pressing against levees the length of the valley, and the question that the business leadership of New Orleans had been quietly debating became urgent: if the river broke through somewhere near the city, could they control where it went?

They decided they could. On April twenty-ninth, nineteen twenty-seven, a coalition of New Orleans business leaders, acting in coordination with Army Corps of Engineers officials, dynamited the Caernarvon levee southeast of the city. The blast was deliberate. The flooding it caused was deliberate. The parishes of St. Bernard and Plaquemines, which lay below the break, were home to fishing communities, predominantly Black families and Croatian immigrant families, who had not been warned. They were told, in some accounts, hours before the dynamiting, not enough time to move homes, boats, or livestock. Their property was destroyed by a decision made without legal authority by people who did not live there.

New Orleans was saved from the flood. St. Bernard and Plaquemines were not.

The broader nineteen twenty-seven Mississippi River flood was the greatest natural disaster in United States history to that point. It displaced more than seven hundred thousand people across seven states. It ended a debate about federal flood control policy that had persisted for decades: within about a year, Congress passed the first comprehensive Flood Control Act, establishing federal responsibility for Mississippi River management. The political transformation was real.

The communities whose homes were sacrificed to trigger that transformation waited years for compensation, which eventually came in inadequate amounts through legal proceedings that the Times-Picayune archives and Louisiana State University Press scholarship have documented in detail. The people whose land was flooded to save the city above them are rarely named in the standard histories of the nineteen twenty-seven flood.

The precedent established that April morning repeated itself, in a different form, in August two thousand five. When the city had to be saved, the question was always the same: who pays? The answer, both times, was the people who lived lowest on the land.