Remembering the Mississippi's greatest flood with author John Barry

Water & Watersheds
By John Shepard

Interviewing an icon
While creating media for CGEE's soon-to-debut Mississippi Multimedia Gallery program, I had the pleasure of interviewing John Barry last fall along the Mississippi River levee in New Orleans. The author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and how it Changed America, Barry is today's most authoritative published voice on the river's history. Building on his understanding of the past, recently he has been working through the courts, in what the New York Times Magazine describes as "The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever," to get the oil and gas industry to make good on their commitments to take responsibly for their impacts on the region's natural resources.

 

The video
Here is John Barry's recouting of another betrayal: how in 1927 city leaders in New Orleans betrayed their rural downstream neighbors in St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parish by dynamiting the levee, inundating their communities, and then failing to make good on their promises to make them whole.