Will legendary flood be repeated?

GREENVILLE, Miss. - As the crest in the Mississippi River rolls toward the heart of the delta, the great flood of 1927 is on a lot of minds.

On April 21 of that year, an engorged Mississippi River broke through a levee a few miles north of Greenville, sending a wall of water down Main Street, forever changing this area's landscape. Homes were crushed, sharecroppers' farms were carried away, thousands were trapped on rooftops for days, and hundreds died.

Residents in Greenville believe they're safe this time, but 75 miles south in Vicksburg, people wonder whether history will repeat itself. Near the site where the Yazoo River empties into the Mississippi, forming a wishbone-like shape, predictions are the water will overtop the tributary levees by more than a foot. Even worse, the levees could fail.

"All they done is put Visqueen (polyethylene sheet) there to stop the levee from being cut in two," said Larry Fuller, a wiry 65-year-old farm manager swapping news with neighbors at Chuck's Dairy Bar in Rolling Fork, which sits in between Greenville and Vicksburg and is expected to be hard-hit. "We could lose the whole delta if that levee breaks."

The situation is grave, but Gerald Galloway, a University of Maryland civil engineer and former Army Corps of Engineers officer, said residents should have confidence in the main levees that hold the bulk of the river. However, he issued a stern warning.

"There is no such thing as never: It's not a word when you're dealing with the river. An old Army Corps of Engineers general said that the best preparation for a war is fighting the river because it's always looking for a place to defeat you, and it's 24-7 in its activity," he said.

John Barry, the author of "Rising Tide," a definitive book on the 1927 flood and a board member of the levee authority in New Orleans, agreed that the levees would likely hold, but said any breach would be bad news.

"Once a breach begins to occur, if you're not totally on top of it immediately with enormous resources, you are in trouble," Barry said. "There's a lot of water in that river, and it's going to keep coming for days, if not weeks. It's not a hurricane where you have a few hours of storm surge."

The 1927 catastrophe occurred after relentless rain the previous year, followed by more precipitation in the spring. Levees burst much farther upstream than Mississippi, but the breach at Mounds Landing was the most destructive.

The nation vowed to never again see Americans suffer in a flood of that kind. During an era driven by racism, blacks built levees at gunpoint, starved in refugee camps, and many were left to fend for themselves during the flood, while whites were favored for rescue.

Following the disaster, Congress got the Army Corps of Engineers to build a 2,203-mile long levee system on the river, but even that work was called into question after Hurricane Katrina, when corps-built levees burst and water filled much of New Orleans, killing more than 1,600 people.

"When you have a series of failures as you see with Katrina, and the interstate bridge in St. Paul, people are going to ask, 'What's happening?'" said Galloway, the civil engineer. "The thing to do is to modernize and upgrade our infrastructure."

At Greenville, the site of the 1927 levee break, families arrive night and day at the old riverfront to take pictures of the current flooding. The yacht club is underwater. So, too, is Archer Island, and the honky tonks and towns out in the basin. The third-floor of a casino boat, lifted by the swollen Mississippi, can be spotted from the stools at the Southern Nights Bar & Grill on Main Street.

"I don't think that levee will break," said James Shoffner, the bar's owner. "If it floods, I'll try to get all the whiskey out."

On the other side of the downtown levee, water has reached higher than rooftops and is still rising.

"The people living in the delta are facing the biggest threat from flooding that they've ever faced in their lifetime," said Cass Pennington, the president of the Delta Council, an economic development agency. "You're talking about schools underwater, highways underwater."

The pending flood is grinding the delta to a halt.

"Right now, I'm short-staffed," said Larry Jue, a 63-year-old storekeeper working the cash register at his family's 70-year-old grocery store, the Sam Sing & Co. Store. The family cooperative has been on the town square in Rolling Fork for as long as anyone can remember.

With no flood insurance and his relatives getting older, a flood could be the end.

"I don't want to leave," he said. "I've been thinking about that. Would I come back or not? I may not. Usually a flood like this, people leave and don't come back."