The Flood of Ought 11

This year's flood through the Mississippi River Delta will go down in history along with the 27 and 37 overflows. The levee system is much better now than it was then. In fact, I doubt there were any levees back then. When the river overflowed, it just meandered wherever it found a low spot.


I live in a small town on the banks of the Kahlua colored St. Francis River(pictured here). It's always this muddy, thus the name Kahlua colored. This picture shows how close to the top of the levee the water came. Just below the bridge in this picture, the levee had to have some reinforcement to keep it from overflowing. I have heard that if that had indeed happened, plans were in place to evacuate us.

The St. Francis River has it's head waters in Missouri. We feed out of Lake Wappella. However, we do feed into the Mississippi, just quite a good ways on down the river.

I live about 3 blocks from the river. This picture shows my yard, even though that isn't my house. The water came up to my house, but didn't get in. I have a crawl space, so it would have taken quite a bit of water to actually get in. Thankfully, I didn't have to find out just how much it would require.

We fared so much better than so many during this trying time. I was never without basic necessities, I don't have to file insurance reports on any damage(other than we considered asking for government assistance for the garden). It looked pretty sad for a while, and we lost a few things, but not so much that we'll go hungry this winter.

I was able to get to work each day with only minimal worry about what I might find when I got home. Fortunately, one of my neighbor/friends called and gave me updates from time to time so I wouldn't worry. All in all I really wasn't inconvenienced in any way by the flood.

Unfortunately, there are so many who have been inundated and still have water/mud in their homes and have lost so much. Many have already started rebuilding already, especially along the Black River. I doubt I'll ever see this type of flood again in my lifetime. This is a part of history. Someday our children and grandchildren will watch footage and see pictures on some weather documentary, just as we see pictures of the floods back in 27 and 37. I'm sure they will look just a foreign to our offspring as those pictures do to us. Hopefully, we won't have to deal with it again.

Hope you are having a good day. Love each other.