Recount of 1937 flood fascinates with suspense and period details
The Thousand-year Flood
ingly omnipotent political machine run by E.H. “Boss” Crump. The downfall began with Crump’s heavy-handed criticism of his protege, Memphis Mayor Watkins Overton, for conditions at the Fairgrounds refugee center. Overton, overwhelmed by the 80,000 flooders who had poured into the city, bristled at the attack and distanced himself from the boss.
The falling- out led Overton to step down in 1940, when Crump himself was elected mayor. The boss immediately resigned, effectively giving the post to Walter Chandler, a congressman. But his newly picked mayor “proved even more aloof” than Overton, and his political organization was “forever weakened,” Welky writes.
While Crump remained active in civic life, “the aging boss never regained control over the town he had both loved and dominated,” the book says.
On a national level, the flood cemented the federal government’s role as the nerve center for dealing with major emergencies, and it spawned a flood- control bill that funded reservoirs across the country. It also helped establish radio as a credible and invaluable news source as stations, particularly WHAS in Louisville, provided timely, accurate reports that Welky credits with saving countless lives.
“The Thousand-year Flood” deftly mixes scholarly research with passages of utter suspense, such as when rising waters threaten to drown inmates in a Kentucky prison.
The book has flaws, but they are not of omission. If anything, Welky’s fascination with Depression- era politics occasionally gets the best of him as he devotes more pages to congressional wrangling over flood- control legislation than an average reader will want to endure.
Memphis readers will notice a few minor errors, such as Welky’s reference to Nonconnah Creek as a river and his statement that the city’s pumping stations were designed to expel groundwater when their job really is to discharge impounded backwater along local tributaries.
But the book’s biggest problem, accuracywise, may be the title. The 1937 disaster was a great many things, but as Welky acknowledges, there’s no way of knowing if it was really a “thousand-year flood” — one so rare it has only a 0.1 percent chance of occurring in any given year.
Welky adopted the term from the informal commentary of the time and sprinkles it throughout the book.
But it’s his misfortune that a deluge roughly equal to the ’37 flood — and even worse along the Mississippi River — occurred just as his book was coming out last year. The 2011 event was an approximately 200-year flood, according to the National Weather Service.
The lesson of Welky’s book is that rivers demand vigilance from those living near them. Calling the ’37 flood something as rare as a “thousand-year” event tends to blunt that message.
— Tom Charlier: (901) 529-2572