[04/27/03]Thirty years ago, the third greatest Mississippi River flood in the 20th Century hit, causing flooding not only in areas unprotected by levees but also in areas behind those protective works.

In the flood of 1973, the Mississippi River crested at 51.61 feet on the Vicksburg gauge on May 13, 8.61 feet above the local flood stage of 43 feet. It was exceeded by the Great Flood of 1927 and the flood of 1937.

In contrast, the Mississippi River has been between 25 and 26 feet on the Vicksburg gauge in the past week and was predicted to be at 23.5 today.

As in all great floods, the stage for the 1973 flood had been set in the previous late summer and early fall when rains began soaking the Mississippi River basin. By the beginning of 1973, the basin was soaked and flood control reservoirs were full. The rains continued, and the Mississippi was rising all along its length.

The river exceeded flood stage at Vicksburg on March 26 that year and continued to rise, reaching the ultimate crest two months later. It didn’t fall below flood stage until June 17.

The whole Mississippi Delta was also having problems.

Not long before 1973, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed the Yazoo Backwater Levee from the Mainline Mississippi River Levee about four miles southeast of Eagle Lake just north of Redwood. Also completed at the time was the Steele Bayou Control Structure near where that stream enters the Yazoo River and the Little Sunflower Control Structure a few miles upstream. The levee’s purpose was to prevent flood water from the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers from backing up and flooding the South Delta. The control structures were to allow drainage from Steele Bayou and several other smaller streams to enter the Yazoo and to close it off when the Yazoo and Mississippi threatened to back up.

In early 1973, there was also rain in North Mississippi, and the Delta was soaked. The problem was compounded by the filling of Arkabutla, Sardis, Enid and Grenada Lakes, reservoirs in North Mississippi designed to help control flooding in the Yazoo River Basin.

As the Mississippi continued to rise, water continued to flow down the Yazoo, and the water level continued to rise in the lower Delta until the control gates had to be closed. All would have been fine, except the rain continued to fall and flow down the streams in the West Delta. When the water hit the closed gates at Steele Bayou and Little Sunflower, it began to back up. It continued to back up until the water reached a maximum elevation of 101.5 feet on the land side of the Steele Bayou Control Structure. That’s 5 to 10 feet above land at Eagle Lake Community.

As the water level rose, it soon became obvious that water from Steele Bayou would eventually flow overland and inundate the year-round homes, weekend cottages and stores that clustered around the huge oxbow lake northwest of Vicksburg. Engineers at the Vicksburg District Corps of Engineers conceived the idea of keeping the water out by erecting a wall made of 4-by-8-foot sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood from where Mississippi 465 crosses the Yazoo Backwater Levee to Eagle Lake Shore Road.

Coupled with the wall was a dam placed in Muddy Bayou to keep water from entering from Steele Bayou. It was necessary because in 1973 the only control of the water level on the lake was a low-water weir, a low concrete dam that kept the lake from draining below a certain elevation.

The dam was built first of earth and then faced on the Steele Bayou side with limestone riprap. The effort eventually failed, allowing much of the Eagle Lake Community to be flooded with up to 6 to 10 feet of water, depending on the underlying ground elevation.

A small portion of the community within the Brunswick Ring Levee, which surrounds 3,500 to 4,000 acres north of the lake, was kept dry.

Robert F. “Sonny” Penley, one of a handful of residents who rode out the flood, said he was told from the sky the area looked like an island of green in the middle of an ocean.

And, indeed, the Mississippi Delta did look like an ocean. In addition to the water between the Mainline Mississippi River levees in Louisiana and Mississippi, water covered the Lower Delta from the Mississippi side levee east to the hill line just north of Vicksburg to near Mayersville and Rolling Fork. The only manmade objects projecting through the muddy water were the ridgelines on a few houses and U.S. 61.

According to information supplied by the Vicksburg District, the backwater flooding in the Delta was extensive and long-lived. The water level rose above 80 feet mean sea level, ground level in some areas, on March 14 and did not drop to that level again until July 4, a total of 113 days. The water rose above elevation 100 feet May 3 and reached the crest of 101.5 feet May 15 and remained there until May 18. The water did not drop below 100 feet until May 29, a total of 27 days.

Farmers in the Delta missed cotton-planting time and were fast approaching the final days for planting soybeans, and though the water had receded, fields remained too soft and muddy to risk putting planters on the ground. Many farmers were able to salvage the crop year by using aircraft to drop soybean seeds into the mud.

In addition to displacing people in the Delta, the flood waters chased residents out of Ford Subdivision and the Chickasaw just north of Vicksburg.