WYATT, Mo — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers exploded a large section of a Mississippi River levee late Monday in a desperate attempt to protect the Illinois town of Cairo from rising floodwaters.
The corps says the break would help Cairo by diverting up to 4 feet of water off the river. As of Monday evening, river levels at Cairo were at historic highs, creating pressure on the floodwall protecting the town.
The blasts were likely to unleash a muddy torrent into empty farm fields.
Brief but bright orange flashes could be seen above the river as the explosions went off. The blast lasted only about two seconds. The darkness kept reporters, who were more than a half mile off the river from seeing how fast the water was moving into the farmland
The decision was made after days of weighing pros and cons, as well as a failed lawsuit by Missouri to block any demolition.
The corps said it should take about three hours to get the levee ready for demolition. It earlier pumped liquid exposives into the levee to prepare for demolition.
Interesting how a real demolition operation takes careful planning and the loading of explosives into the targeted area yet in conspiracy theories the "All Clear" warning horn is never sounded.
Last week due to some snaffu in my NetFlix DVD queue I received a DVD detailing the lives of New Orleans evacuees that were sent to the Mormon (and Conservative) state of Utah in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
At the people were interviewed there were several of them who made reference to hearing a "boom" near the levee, just prior to their community being flooded. They were demanding an investigation as to what this sound was and if it was part of a conspiracy to flood the homes of Black people - just as the case during an earlier flood on the Mississippi River in Caernovon Louisiana during the 1927 flood.
It seems interesting that despite the fact that deliberate actions such as this trigger a court battle between interest groups who debate over the resulting impact - the CONSPIRACY THEORY of today never has to show a court transcript which showed that the "exploding levee". Their goal is similar to the "Birthers" - to spread FUD into their intended audience for the sake of political opportunism - except they aren't called RACISTS for stringing Black people along by keeping them in a racially defensive posture. (If a tree falls when a FAVORABLE PERSON is in office - does it make a sound when it is purposefully exploded? )
From Wikipedia's entry on the 1927 Flood
As the flood approached New Orleans, Louisiana, about 30 tons of dynamite were set off on the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana and sent 250,000 ft³/s (7,000 m³/s) of water pouring through. This was intended to prevent New Orleans from experiencing serious damage, but flooded much of St. Bernard Parish and all of Plaquemines Parish's east bank. As it turned out, the destruction of the Caernarvon levee was unnecessary; several major levee breaks well upstream of New Orleans, including one the day after the demolitions, made it impossible for flood waters to seriously threaten the city.
.......
The aftermath of the flood was one factor in the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities. Previously, the move from the rural South to the Northern cities had virtually stopped. In June 1927 the flood waters began to recede, however the interracial relations were too strained to withstand. Hostilities had ruptured between the races; a black man was shot by a white police officer when he refused to be conscripted to unload a relief boat.[4][5] As a result of displacement lasting up to six months, tens of thousands of local African-Americans moved to the big cities of the North, particularly Chicago, many thousands more followed in the following decades.[6]
The flood propelled Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who was in charge of flood relief operations, into the national spotlight and set the stage for his election to the Presidency. It also helped Huey Long be elected Louisiana Governor in 1928.[7]:408-409, 477, 487
The flood had the unlikely effect of contributing to both the election of Herbert Hoover as President, and his defeat four years later. He was much lauded for his masterful handling of the refugee camps, but later concerns over the treatment of blacks in those camps caused him to make promises to the African-American community which he later broke, losing the black vote in his re-election campaign.[7]:259-290, passim
Several reports on the terrible situation in the refugee camps, including one by the Colored Advisory Commission by Robert Russa Moton, were kept out of the media at the request of Herbert Hoover, with the promise of further reforms for blacks after the presidential election. When he failed to keep the promise, Moton and other influential African-Americans helped to shift the allegiance of Black Americans from the Republican party to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats.[7]:415
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