VALLEY PARK — Memories of 1973 are a photo album away for those who survived the historic flood on U.S. 61 in Valley Park.

“My mother lived right yonder and had 18 inches in the house,” said Ted Porter, a retired Vicksburg Chemical supervisor who took desperate measures to protect his old homestead on the west side of U.S. 61 near a gravel service road by the U.S. Post Office.

“I lived over there,” Porter said. “By the post office, the road joins the railroad track. Right in that curve, we took a Caterpillar and pushed dirt up and tied it to an old sawmill levee that went around that area. We had to fight the railroad track. They were coming down here and said, ‘Take that thing away,’ because we jammed it to the tracks. We told ’em if they did, they’d have to dodge 30.06 bullets.”

Two years later, he moved across 61 to Deer Creek Circle and about a mile east of the highway. Despite flooding in fields of corn, beans and cotton on the east side of the two-lane highway in the tiny Issaquena County community, his house has stayed dry.

“We’ve been blessed with that. In 2008 and 2009, we had water to that tree line right there,” Porter said standing in his back yard late last week. “But the locks at Steele Bayou held out 10 feet. I’ve never gotten water in this house.”

Margretia Coker rode out the flood on Deer Creek Circle with her husband, R.E., pumping seep water from the levee they built and watching the road become a seafood farm.

“We stood up day and night,” Coker said. “We didn’t try to save the yard, we just tried to save the house. You could walk off the top of the sandbags onto the top of the house.”

The 1973 flood saw the Mississippi River reach the fifth-highest crest on record at Vicksburg, at 51.6 feet. This year’s second springtime crest is poised to challenge record highs and flooding frequency. Already the fourth flood stage crest in four years, the current high water is poised to reach 53.5 feet by May 18, which would be the highest since 1927.

While a few feet below the historic 1927 deluge’s 56.2-foot crest, the 1973 flood unleashed the largest volume of water to flow down the Mississippi since 1927. About 17 million acres were inundated throughout the Mississippi Valley during the flood estimated to have caused $170 million in damages in the Delta. It also revealed weaknesses in the Lower Mississippi River’s flood protection system, setting in motion a series of improvements that face big tests in coming weeks.

After 1973, the Corps found 69 miles of deficient levees in the 212-mile Mississippi Levee District from Bolivar to Warren counties. A project was begun to raise the system by up to 8 feet in the lowest spots and is ongoing, but it’s not expected to wrap up until at least 2031.

Gates at Steele Bayou were completed in 1969. The structure keeps water from creeks and smaller rivers from flowing into the Mississippi and Yazoo during high stages. It holds that water in a 4,093-square-mile drainage basin in Issaquena and Sharkey counties, leaving millions of acres of farmland wet until the gates are reopened after the rivers are naturally lowered.

The Yazoo Backwater Levee was completed in 1978 and has helped lessen the impact of backwater flooding such as 1973, when more than 1 million acres in Mississippi went underwater.

A proposed pump station to move water trapped behind the gates to the river has been opposed by environmental groups for decades and was denied by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008. The Board of Mississippi Levee Commissioners is still appealing court decisions upholding the EPA ruling.

Complicating a recovery from this month’s flood is that water will hover above 50 feet for about a month before it recedes. Corps officials contend it’ll present a serious challenge for the agency, but also are confident in the levee’s ability to hold backwater flooding from the Yazoo River off residences along 61 through Valley Park and Onward.

Tributaries to the Mississippi, including the Ouachita, Tensas and Red rivers in Louisiana, aren’t expected to be at flood stage as they were in 1973, said Robert Simrall, chief of the Water Control Division for the Vicksburg District.

“In 1973, the levee wasn’t completed,” Simrall said. “Everything north of the levee system will not be as affected as it was in 1973 because of the levee being there.”

Confidence continued Friday after Corps officials and others met with residents of Eagle Lake concerning public safety and levee stability issues in the next few weeks.

“It’s kind of like taking that final test in school,” said Kent Parrish, a senior Corps project manager over Mississippi River levees. “I think we’re ready for the test.”

Still, the high water wracks nerves for Robert Wilson, who lives in one of several homes on Dixie Road nearly encircled with a small levee built during the 1973 flood fight.

“I hear it’s going to be bad,” said Wilson, who worked on the river in 2008 and remembers barges backing up in Greenville due to marine traffic restrictions. “If I hear the levee’s going to break, I’m grabbing my son and going down to Vicksburg.”

Porter said he’s kept his flood insurance current and even purchased an extra policy recently.

“When you live in a water-prone area,” Porter said, “you’ve got to learn how to live with it — or move.”

R.E. Coker is now living in a nursing care, and she if Valley Park goes under water, she’ll likely move to be with family in Vicskburg.

“I have terrible fears of having to move,” she said. “And, if I move, I won’t come back.”