The water was strangely calm on the Mississippi River Friday as it was nearing its crest.
Four of us took a small 16-foot aluminum bass boat downriver from the Greenville city front to the north end of Refuge Hunting Club to look at how the water was there.
Along the way, we passed Warfield Point Park and couldn’t help but take a few photos standing on submerged picnic tables in the park itself.
Though I’d been on the river many times before, I hadn’t noticed the dilapidated state of the billboard facing the river in the park boundary. The billboard is so old, it still has a 601-exchange number for a Greenville-based business. Perhaps our board of supervisors could repurpose that billboard as a welcome-to-Greenville sign?
While the river is at flood stage, it is well within the protective barriers of the levee system we so desperately depend upon.
If there were no levees protecting the city, water would stand about 4 to 6 feet deep here at our current flood level.
That would make Greenville and the greater delta uninhabitable for modern humans.
And it was for a very long time.
The Delta is one of the few places in America that white settlers found mostly empty. Though there are extensive mound systems indicating a long period of habitation by pre-Columbian societies, those groups mostly left the area prior to 1500 A.D.
In Archeological Report No. 23 by Jeffrey P. Brain titled Winterville, Late Prehistoric Culture Contact in the Lower Mississippi Valley, the author points to the Mississippi River crossing made by Hernando DeSoto in 1540 had little to no contact with people in the area of the Winterville Mounds.
Since the first settlers in the area crossed Lake Washington to begin settling and farming, levee building has been on their minds.
There are still remnants of pre-civil war levees in the front yards of some houses on Bayou Road.
Those levees, though worn down by years of life, are tiny compared to what the levees are today, but were protecting against a much different river.
The levees of today shape the river as well as protect the land from it.
The recent floods of 2016 and 2019 were as large or larger in terms of water volume as the 1927 flood that was the impetus for the levee system.
The amount of engineering involved in creating a sustainable and successful levee system boggles my mind.
The calculations of flood heights and levee protection are so strong, people are willing to bet hundreds of thousands of dollars on houses inside the levee system.
All along the river there are houses on stilts that will, at some time in their existence, be completely surrounded by water but also safe from it.
The owners of those houses know the day and time they will have to turn off breakers to electricity or move gas tanks and equipment stored on the ground all thanks to the engineers along the river system.
Now, the river is set to crest at 54.5 feet on April 26. Those crest projections change regularly.
I can only imagine the number of variables factored to make the model for projecting the water height on any given day in the Mississippi River.
The river height report is a daily reminder here in this river town that we are totally dependent on our government and the maintenance of one of the first large-scale federal relief projects in U.S. History.
If not for folks like the Percy family, who had connections with the federal government through senate service and the Red Cross, this levee project may not have happened.
But it did and though it was said to have been completed in the 1970s after beginning in 1938, the actual completion date could come in the next few years as the pumps are set to be built at the Steel Bayou Structure in the South Delta.
We still live under the threat of a devastating flood in the South Delta until those pumps are complete, but the larger Delta can go about its regular course of business knowing the levees that protect it from the river that created it will hold.
Jon Alverson is proud to be the publisher and editor of the Delta Democrat-Times. Write to him at jalverson@ddtonline.com or call him at 662-335-1155.
