The Louisville Flood
The photographer Margaret Bourke-White is why I am familiar with the great flood of 1937. When the Ohio river flooded 1 million people were left homeless and 385 people were dead. At its peak the water rose reached 57 feet (17 m) in the Louisville area, setting a new record. 70 percent of the city was under water at that time. Martial law was declared in Evansville, Indiana where the water 
level was at 54 feet (16 m). It took nearly three weeks for the water to fall below flood stage.
She took a picture shortly after the flood showing mostly black people lined up to receive free bread. Behind them was a billboard showing a happy white family and their dog driving along and smiling like a bunch of fools. The billboard said, “WORLD'S HIGHEST STANDARD OF LIVING” and “There's no way like to American Way.” This picture is still famous today more than 70 years later. I bought this particular copy of the pic at a Margaret Bourke-White exhibition in Amsterdam several years ago.
What the billboard said was grossly incorrect. It was nothing more than blatant government propaganda trying to keep the poor of America from rising up in some kind of an insurrection or a revolution.
Wikipedia says, “The 1937 flood was so unprecedented, civic and industrial groups forced authorities to create a comprehensive plan for flood control. The plan involved reducing Ohio River flood heights by creating more than seventy storage reservoirs. The plan was not fully completed by the Army Corps of Engineers until the early 1940s, but it has drastically reduced flood damages ever since.”
Now in 2010 the Louisville area is experiencing comparable flooding to what it saw in 1937, prior to these 70 dams and storage reservoirs being built.
There is virtual consensus among all the real climate scientists (I just ignore the right-wing phreaks and the various lunatic deniers) that as levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere increase global warming will increase, and the severity of storms and weather will increase. Some parts of the globe which previously had received enough rain to raise food crops will become deserts, and almost everywhere we will see increasingly strong storms. Perhaps we are witnessing signs of it already.
-
-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_River_flood_of_1937
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
