In his book “Rising Tide” about the 1927 Great Mississippi River Flood, author John M. Barry describes the Mississippi River in flood.

“There is no sight like the rising Mississippi. One cannot look at it without awe, or watch it rise and press against levees without fear. Unlike a human enemy, the river has no weakness, makes no mistakes, is perfect; unlike a human enemy, it will find and exploit any weakness.”

In 1927, the Mississippi River did more than leave people in awe. Its waters covered 16.8 million acres, killed hundreds of people, left another 700,000 people homeless, made acres of farmland infrastructure in 170 counties in seven states unusable, and destroyed thousands of businesses.

It also changed the way the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers looked at flood control and led to the birth of the Corps’ Waterways Experiment Station, now known as the Engineering Research and Development Center.

The Corps’ publication “Protecting the Alluvial Empire: The Mississippi River and Tributaries Project,” which discusses the Corps program to improve flood control developed after the 1927 flood, called the flood “the most destructive flood in United States history.”

The Great Flood of 1927, as it’s called, affected 11 states along the Mississippi and its tributaries, causing 246 flood-related deaths. Water covered farmland and infrastructure in 170 counties in seven states and destroyed thousands of businesses, according to the Corps publication.

Property damage at the time was estimated at more than $400 million, the equivalent of more than $5 billion dollars today across all of the states. Economic losses were estimated at $1 billion 1927 dollars, which was equivalent to one-third the federal budget at the time, or more than $13.69 billion today.

A series of heavy rains that began in August 1926 and continued through April 1927 caused rivers and tributaries of the Mississippi to flood.

In October 1926, in Vicksburg, the Mississippi’s level at Vicksburg exceeded 40 feet. On New Year’s Eve 1926 it reached flood stage at Cairo, Ill.

On April 21, 1927, the Mounds Landing levee broke below the Mississippi’s junction with the Arkansas River approximately 12 miles north of Greenville, flooding Greenville. Within 10 days, 1 million acres of land across the Mississippi Delta Region were immersed under water at least 10 feet deep.

“Vicksburg itself wasn’t as affected as much as many areas because it sits high on a bluff,” said Charles Camillo, director of the Mississippi Valley Commission. “The impact was on the riverfront, but more than anything was the influx of refugees. They were left homeless after the flood of 1927, and a good many of them were housed in the tent camps here in Vicksburg.”

“The tent camps were all over the city,” local historian Gordon Cotton said. “Many people here had relatives affected by the flood and took them in.”

The extensive damage from the flood resulted in the 1928 Flood Control Act, which is responsible for the changes and improvements in flood control that saved much of the same area in the 2011 spring flood and presently has totaled more than $14 billion.

It also led to the development of and establishment of the Waterways Experiment Station, which was built in 1931 and had a working model of the Mississippi to work different scenarios and tests.

“The goal was to be able to understand the river, and have the hydraulic experts where these questions could be answered and research could be performed to understand what direction we needed to go to manage the river,” said Dr. James Lewis, acting director of ERDC’s River Engineering Branch. “Since then the Waterways Experiment Station has been involved with the Mississippi River management.”

At one time, scientists and engineers used prepared models to study the river. Now, Lewis said, computer models are used.

“With computer models we are able to simulate very long stretches of the river for very long periods time, trying to go 50 years in the future with some projected conditions trying to take on some complicated scenarios.” he said.

Under the Flood Control Act, existing levees were repaired and other measures built, including a main levee system from Cape Girardeau, Mo., and south to Venice, La., a system of artificial cutoffs along the river to improved the flood-carrying capacity of the channel, and backwater areas located at the mouths of the St. Francis, White, Yazoo and Red rivers, which are designed to allow the river to expand during floods.

The Yazoo backwater area is the largest of the four backwater areas at 634,000 acres.

“The old system was simply trying to use the levees to confine the river,” Camillo said. “And what came out of the 1928 Flood Control Act was a complete reversal that you could not try to confine floods with levees.

“The river just is going to find a way to reclaim its floodplain. What they did was accommodate the river’s tendency to flood in a controlled way. So they had these designated areas (where) they were going to allow the river to have access to its floodplain.

“So what you are going to do is protect all that property from most flooding, and then when you come up to these very significant floods that would blow out the levee system in the past, they’re going to draw the pressure off and let the river do what it wants to do and give these safety valves and allow that water to go into these predesignated safety areas.”

The levee system was going to be stronger and wider, Camillo said.

The flood control program is based on the construction of an engineering feature to convey a project design flood, which represents the worst probable scenario meteorologists and engineers can develop, involving rainy weather and maximum flooding on the Mississippi’s tributaries.

The project design flood, which was originated in 1928, was revised in 1941 and again in 1956.

“The design flood idea had been debated back into the 1880s,” Camillo said, adding before 1927, the levee systems were designed to handle the last great flood of record.

“It (the design project flood) came out just after the 1927 flood, which just overwhelmed that system,” he said. “In order to prevent that from happening again, they wanted to come up with what they considered to be the worst case, the worst possible case scenario there was, and it just emanated from how badly that (1927) flood overwhelmed the system.”

The proof of how well the research and work on flood control structures since the1927 flood worked was the lack of damage caused by the 2011 spring Mississippi River flood, Camillo said. The Mississippi River at Vicksburg crested on May 19, 2011, at 57.1; 14.1 feet above flood stage and nine-tenths of a foot above the Great Flood of 1927.

“MR&T (Mississippi River and Tributaries Project) worked. That 2011 flood was bigger than the 1927 flood in terms of volume in many locations on the river, and you didn’t see that same devastation,” Camillo said. “All the work, all the taxpayer money that went into that — it proved to be a wise investment. It validated that investment.”