The anniversary of a major event in Vicksburg’s history passed Thursday and very few remembered.

Some may have forgotten because of the pace of daily life. Some, possibly, because they didn’t want remember the events surrounding it.

Thursday marked the fifth anniversary the crest of the 2011 flood passed Vicksburg at 57.1 feet, more than 14 feet above flood stage and nine-tenths of a foot above the 56.2-foot height of the 1927 Mississippi River flood.

The flood was unique. The levels the river reached for the first time closed U.S. 61 North and South, and Mississippi 465. It forced the Vicksburg Warren School District to evacuate Redwood Elementary and build a levee around it. And it came while the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Delta were in a drought.

By the time the floodwater receded, the river displaced more than 3,200 people in Vicksburg and Warren County from 707 homes.

“That was the worst flood I’ve ever been into,” said Linda Johnson, who was forced to leave her home on Williams Street in Ford Subdivision. “I was gone from my house about two months. I lost everything. It took everything out. My house was 10 feet in the air and I had 5 feet in the house so that was halfway.”

When she heard the water was going down, “I felt relief. I was glad, and I really didn’t think the water could get into my house until I came over here. It was a shock. I just cried.”

“It was something,” said Chotard Landing Resort owner Jerry Johnson. “I lost a store and a tavern. A lot of cabins got wet; it was a big time. I don’t want to go through another one. It was awful; it was really a mess. We’re rebuilt now.”

The flood caught officials by surprise.

“The (National) Weather Service puts out a spring flood forecast, and that year it was showing below normal rainfall,” said Robert Simrall, chief of water control for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Vicksburg District. “We weren’t expecting any heavy rains, so we were all just thinking we might not have any issues that year and that one storm event put us up to record stage.

Rainfall in the Upper Mississippi Valley caused the Weather Service on April 22, 2011, to forecast the river reaching 53 feet at Vicksburg. Several weeks later, a huge rainstorm hit the upper Mississippi River Valley and history was made.

“They said Cairo (Ill.) could go to 63 feet, an extreme stage, and everyone in the room here was a state of shock,” he said. “The question was what does 63 feet mean for us here? They told us the forecast was going to 57.5 feet, exceeding the 1927 flood by several feet — well in excess of anything we had seen.

“A flood like that occurs once in lifetime. We didn’t know what the local impacts would be around here. We learned a lot about where the water would go, and we had some really good inundation models.

Lanny Barfield, a geotechnical analyst and levee safety officer with the District, said a big concern was seepage and sand boils — attempts by the river to undercut a levee, causing internal erosion where the levee’s base is undermined, making it to drop and allowing the river to top the levee, causing the levee to crevasse.

“A lot of people don’t realize that exists,” Barfield said. “They’re thinking height, ‘As long as it doesn’t go over, I’m fine.’ We’re looking at another phenomenon.”

“We had some serious places with significant, aggressive (sand) boils like district hadn’t seen before.” Peter Nimrod, chief engineer for the Mississippi Levee Board, the district, had 11 problem areas during the 2011 flood where the river attempted to undercut the levees. He said the problem was corrected by the Vicksburg District with the installation of 187 relieve wells and 4 miles of new landside berms.

And the drought condition made the problems easy to find.

“I remember standing on levees and looking at so much water everywhere and then looking back toward the landside and seeing farmers irrigating their crops,” said Greg Raimondo, who at the time was deputy commander for the Vicksburg District.

“We were in a pretty bad drought down here. It turned out that was a really good thing for us, because we knew when we saw water on the backsides of the levees, there was an issue. It wasn’t hard to find sand boils. That made it a lot easier on us to fight this flood.”

While the people at the Vicksburg District prepared its flood fight, Bob Anderson, a public affairs officer with the Mississippi Valley Division was with then-MVD commander and Mississippi River Commission president Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh at Cairo, Ill., as the Corps prepared to blow the levee to the Birds Point/New Madrid Floodway to relieve a flood threat to Cairo and several other river cities.

“When they blew the levee, you could feel the physical vibrations of the explosion,” he said.

“Then you could hear the slight rushing of water and that was the water going in the floodway. In the morning, you could physically see the level had dropped by three feet.”

He also remembered standing on the Old River Control Structure in Louisiana as it was opened.

“You felt the power of the river,” he said. “The whole structure was vibrating. It was like a constant movement of the earth. It gave me a sense that nature is far more powerful than we really give it credit for.”

“The guys who came 50 years before us that designed all this stuff, they seemed to have a clue what they were doing, Raimondo said. “The system was tested and it came through really good. The system held up.”

“It (the flood) showed us where we needed to go out and look a little bit closer, but when you look at the overall situation and how it passed the flood, it (the levee system) performed like it was supposed to do,” said James Ross, chief of operations for the Vicksburg district.

“It was a much bigger event than 1927, but there were no failures and no casualties, so it was a tremendous success,” Nimrod said.

“So all work that had been done in the past 87 years for flood control really did a great job, and the partnerships were fantastic.”

Raimondo said the flood also served as an education for younger District engineers.

“We not only learned a lot about the system, but these young engineers learned how to flood fight, how to prepare inundation maps; they learned they jobs in a tremendous way.”

“Some of these young people are stepping up into leadership roles because of the flood,” Simrall said. “We just don’t get that opportunity for them to experience how we operate (in a major flood); you’re talking a whole career of work. You don’t want to see a flood, but timing for staff was good for them an event like this early in their career.”