Narrator: The rain began to fall on New Orleans sometime during the early morning hours of April 15th, 1927, Good Friday. Already since January, there had been four storms more severe than any in the previous decade. But this one would be the worst. Over the next eighteen hours, some fifteen inches of rain would fall -- more in one day than New Orleans typically got in its wettest month.
Uptown, in one of the grand homes that lined St. Charles Avenue, James Pierce Butler Jr. woke to the sound of the rain, lashing against his windows. Butler cut an imposing figure. Six-foot-five, driven and notoriously aloof, he headed up New Orleans' Canal Bank, the only one in the South to rank among the world's largest, and served as President of the Boston Club, a group that revered wealth and power every bit as much as the Pickwickians. He was also one of just six private citizens to sit on the Board of Liquidation of the City Debt, the agency that held the key to the municipal coffers.
John Barry, Writer: It was a private organization, made up almost exclusively of the most important bankers and lawyers of the city. They had lifetime appointments, like the supreme court. But when one of them died or left, they named the next person to succeed them. They weren't named by the governor or the mayor. And the city couldn't issue bonds for schools or roads or anything else, without the approval of this board of self-appointed bankers.
Narrator: In years past, a man of Butler's position might have been alarmed by the downpour outside. To a city situated largely below sea level, heavy rain meant floods, floods meant chaos, and chaos was never good for business. But for now anyway, Butler was not troubled by the storm. The Wood pump would take care of that.
Lawrence N. Powell, Historian: the Wood pump was invented by a Tulane engineer, A. Baldwin Wood, who worked for the Sewage and Water Board. And he came up with a pump, a screw pump that had enough power, enough, propulsive power to, to not only lift up the water but then to push it out over the levees. And once you had that hydrology in place so much becomes possible.
Narrator: The Wood pump had been the cornerstone of an ambitious, turn-of-the-century effort to shore up the city's economy, which had been faltering ever since the Civil War. Goods that once had floated to market along the Mississippi -- and through the port of New Orleans -- now increasingly went by rail, and anxious businessmen had pressed for large-scale civic improvements in hope of making their city more hospitable to commerce.
For much of its history, New Orleans had suffered a reputation as the most unsanitary city in the country. As late as the turn of the century, when the population had topped a quarter million, there still had been no comprehensive sewage system. Drinking water had come mainly from mosquito-infested cisterns, or else directly from the murky river, which also served as the dumping ground for most of the city's waste. And then, there was the so-called back swamp, the cypress wetlands that stood between the natural levee and the shore of Lake Pontchartrain.
Peirce Lewis, Geographer: It was known as the quarter of the damned. Because the consistency of the back swamp is something between oh, let's say over cooked pea soup and warm Jell-O. And in that climate, it's mosquito ridden. There were yellow fever epidemics periodically but they could do something in New Orleans, thanks to the Wood pumps, that they had never done before and that was to pump out the water in the back swamp.
Narrator: By 1914, the city's new drainage system consisted of seven pumping stations and seventy miles of canals, and the back swamp was all but dry.
The impact was revolutionary. Average life expectancy, which in 1880 had been fewer than 46 years, soared. And for the first time in its history, New Orleans was freed from the natural levee. As then Mayor Martin Behrman put it: "Land, before worthless, became at once available for agriculture and city development." Older neighborhoods soon stretched north toward the lake, and brand new neighborhoods sprang up along its shores -- the most desirable of them reserved exclusively for whites.
Meanwhile, artificial levees were raised, new shipping canals built, the port modernized. By 1920, construction in the newly-drained areas had more than doubled the city's property tax assessments and business was once again booming.
Lawrence N. Powell, Historian: This was a time in a lot of these cities- you know New York City, and Philadelphia, and Baltimore are upgrading their infrastructure in major ways. And New Orleans was part of that. It was one of these great kind of civil engineering, almost promethean civil engineering projects. And we really were on the forefront of that.
Narrator: Now, on Good Friday 1927, all that would be jeopardized by a bolt of lightning that knocked out the central power station and cut off electricity to the Wood pumps. By the time James Butler woke that morning, New Orleans had already begun to fill with water. At sundown, more than four feet stood in the city's streets.
Ari Kelman, Historian: The interesting thing about that Good Friday flood is that there's a huge river flood slowly bearing down on the city; one of the biggest floods in the nation's history. The 1927 flood is, is moving slowly and inexorably toward New Orleans and so when the city fills with water, it has nothing to do with the Mississippi River at all, it's just a big rainstorm.
But the national press corps is in New Orleans already, because it's covering this huge river flood and their photographers just take pictures of a flooded city. And they juxtaposed those images with stories of this horrendous river flood and so it fuels panic.
Narrator: Although the Mississippi posed no immediate threat to New Orleans, the mere prospect of a river flood had sent the city into a tailspin. Local wholesalers already had slashed their prices in a desperate effort to unload inventories. Anxious residents, meanwhile, were building boats, withdrawing huge sums from the banks, scrambling to get out of town.
The storm and the pump failure had served only to ratchet up the hysteria -- and now, the city's investors were getting jumpy. By the close of business on Good Friday, most of the bankers in town, including Butler, had received urgent wires from New York and elsewhere demanding assurances as to the city's safety.
Ari Kelman, Historian: So they decide that they've got to do something drastic. They've got to demonstrate to investors that their money is safe. They've got to demonstrate to themselves, to the city of New Orleans that they are safe, that they're not going to be washed away in this river flood that's moving toward them. So they decide to blow up the levee below the city.
John Barry, Writer: Dynamiting the levee would allow the river water to escape like pulling a plug out of a bathtub. The Corps of Engineers violently opposed the move. They understood how weak the entire flood control system was and that that system was going to break hundreds of miles above New Orleans. So that water was going to spread out over its natural flood plain and never get to the city. But Butler and the rest of the people in his group were determined they were going to dynamite the levee and they were going to use their political power to make it happen.
Narrator: They chose a site beyond the city limits, thirteen miles downriver from Canal Street, at a place called Poydras. Dynamiting the levee there would inundate all of St. Bernard Parish and part of Plaquemines Parish -- an area of interlocking wetlands that was home to some 12,000 people, most of them just barely scraping by as fur trappers or fisherman. All were now slated to be refugees.
Within a week of the Good Friday Flood, Butler and his allies had organized themselves into the ad hoc Citizens Flood Relief Committee, and had manipulated the state's high-ranking elected officials into signing off on the plan to blow the Poydras levee.
Ari Kelman, Historian: They ask for the, the right to blow up the levee below the city, and they get it, because of who they are. To say no to them is politically suicidal.
Narrator: On Wednesday, April 27th, residents of the soon-to-be-flooded parishes evacuated their homes, amid promises that they would be compensated for their losses. Butler, meanwhile, composed a wire destined for banks and investors all across the country. "[D]ecision... to cut levee... has removed all danger to city," he wrote, "Business and all other activities are moving along in a normal manner. New Orleans never has been flooded by Mississippi River and in our judgment never will be."
Two days later, with spectators jamming the road that ran south to St. Bernard Parish and the families of St. Charles Avenue watching from their yachts in the river, the charges were set at Poydras.
Ari Kelman: They invite members of the press corps from throughout the United States and the world to go and view this. They do flyovers with military aircraft to make sure that the area is secure. And then at a certain moment they lower the plunger and there's this massive explosion and then nothing happens. It's a big dud. It turns out that the levee is better constructed than anyone thought.
Narrator: It would take ten days and 39 tons of dynamite to finally breach the levee. Before the job was finished, another levee upriver would give way, just as predicted.
Ari Kelman, Historian: There was never any real reason to blow up the levee and that's probably the most tragic element of the story. For St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parish and the people who live there it's a disaster. Makes them virtually uninhabitable for many, many months. The Citizens Flood Relief Committee promise that they're going to give them reparations. And they never make good on that promise.
John Barry, Writer: While these 12,000 refugees, created by the city of New Orleans were being housed in warehouses, Jim Butler and his colleagues decided that they would deduct the cost of feeding these people from any settlement that they gave them. They simply stiffed the victims. So what this flood did was wash away the surface and reveal what lay beneath. And what lay beneath was some pretty ruthless people who would use power for what they regarded as the best interest of the city.