The Flood of '27 The nation's most destructive flood began with the heavy rains that pounded the central basin of the Mississippi in the summer of 1926. By September, swollen tributaries were pouring through Kansas and Iowa. By May, the Mississippi below Memphis was a watery oval as wide as 60 miles across. Twenty-seven thousand square miles were inundated to depths up to 30 feet.
Nobody knows exactly how many died in the great disaster.
Historians once estimated the death toll at 250 victims, but deaths due to disease and exposure after the immediate flood are hard to tally. At Mounds Landing near Greenville, for example, a flood surge blew out a dike where thousands of terrified workers were building a bunker of sandbags. Swirling west, the flood ravaged 2.7 acres of farmland before rejoining the mainstem of the Mississippi en route to Natchez and New Orleans. As the wall of water moved south into Louisiana, state and city officials prepared for the worst. Governor James Thomson, with the acquiescence of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and the Chief Engineer Edgar Jadwin, authorized a plan to turn the flood into the St. Bernard and Plaquemine Parish marshlands, a desperate attempt to save New Orleans.