Before the Crest: the Great Mississippi River Flood of 2011 in Vicksburg

The water is rising and, as of May 10, 2011, has exceeded all historical river elevations in Vicksburg. Fortunately, unlike a tsunami situation, there has been plenty of warning about the approach of the flood crest and industries and the City of Vicksburg have been preparing.

The Anderson Tully wood products company was inundated in the 1973 flood. A retired worker told me that it took five years to dry out the timber. To prevent future flooding, the company built a levee around the mill after 1973. But for the last week, a fleet of trucks has been delivering dirt and clay, and the levee is being extensively raised. The photograph above was Sunday, May 8, 2011.

Redwood Elementary School, in Redwood, north of Vicksburg, was vulnerable to water backing up a creek that runs behind the school. To protect it, the school department hired a contractor to build a levee. This was a significant berm, over 2 m high for much of its extent. 

The students evacuated the school and will finish the year at another facility. They piled books and materials in the auditorium (Friday, May 6).

Most of Vicksburg was built on the loess bluffs, high above the river. The city waterfront, where steamboats unloaded and warehouses were located, historically flooded. To protect the waterfront, the Corps of Engineers built concrete flood walls early in the 20th century and greatly expanded them after the 1927 flood, which overtopped the earlier walls. But roads and railroads need to pass through the wall in several locations. These gaps in the walls are plugged with wood timbers held in place by steel I-beams. The city workers have to dig down into the pavement to find the anchor points for the I-beams. The timbers are sealed with oakum and tar and chained down (Friday, May 6). Later, the city workers found that plastic sheeting was more effective at preventing seepage.

I have never before seen the timber walls installed to their full height, flush with the concrete walls. The timbers have never been tested to hold back three meters of water. The gate above is at Levee Street near the old railroad depot. Sadly, the depot, which is being renovated to become part of the river museum, is on the unprotected side of the flood wall. 

The Ford subdivision off North Washington Street has been prone to flooding for decades. Over the last five years, the City has bought many of the low houses (the ones built on slabs) and demolished them, but there are still many residents who have to evacuate. The views above are from Railroad Alley, taken Friday, May 6.

The car, which is rapidly losing its patch of pavement, is on Eva Street (Friday, May 6). 

This is Ford Street, looking towards the west (Friday, May 6). In previous inundations, residents told me that cleanup was always a messy business, and they had to call the rangers to take away snakes and alligators.

Across the river in Delta, Louisiana, this is the view from the levee facing east towards the old Mississippi River bridge. Normally, the terrain in the foreground is dry. The bridge still carries Kansas Southern Railroad trains, but the automobile road is closed.

Please see the subsequent blog articles to read about the progress of the historic 2011 flood.

Lumber town: Berlin, New Hampshire

Berlin is a mill and paper town on the Androscoggin River in northern New Hampshire. Situated north of the White Mountains, it is about four hours drive from Boston and seems to be far away from anything.

Berlin was once a thriving industrial city. Prosperity in the early 20th century came from timber harvesting, lumber mills, and paper factories. Workers were a mix of ethnic groups, with many being French Canadians. Many families spoke French exclusively, and schools taught English a foreign language. Sadly, since World War II, the town has been on a steady decline, and a large paper mill closed recently.

Immigrant families lived in wood double- and triple-deckers. You find this type of semi-mass-produced housing in former industrial cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston, but the architectural style was also used here in New Hampshire. I don't know how residents heated in the past; possibly boilers in the cellar used coal (brought in by railroad). Life in these tenements must have been dreary, but at least the men and women had jobs and dreamed of a better future. Some participated in winter sports. In 1882, a group of Scandinavians founded the nation's first ski club, named the Nansen Ski Club in honor of Fridtjof Nansen, the explorer who in 1888 skied across Greenland. Today, much of this housing stock is seedy and many units are empty.

You can still see elements of a prosperous past. The beautiful Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church overlooks the city from the west side of the valley.

It's interesting that the cornerstone was laid before the Bolshevik revolution.

July 2015 update: a friend sent me an article from the April 25, 2015, Conway Daily Sun,  The article states that the church was built by Russian immigrants who came to Berlin in the early 1900s to work in paper mills. By 1915, there were 300 Russian men in town, and in March of 2015, Father Arcady Piotrowsky of Cleveland was assigned to Berlin to help found the Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church. (They liked long names then.) The church's icons may have been some of the last to leave Russia before Czar Nicholas II was overthrown. During the 20th century, the parish dwindled, and  the church closed in 1963. It remained empty for 11 years. In 1974, a family of one of the original founders asked to hold the funeral service at the closed church, and parishioners refurbished the domes and paintings. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

This factory/warehouse was sheathed with zinc plates patterned to look like cut stone blocks. This type of busy pattern, resembling limestone blocks, must have been popular in the late 1800s because early-vintage cinder blocks were also molded with this design.

I think this kind of sheathing was most commonly used before the 1940s. By the 1960s, aluminum siding became more popular than steel sheathing because it was lighter and easier to install.

I have seen other buildings with zinc sheathing in other parts of the country. One was a church in Johnson City, Texas, where Lyndon Johnson went to services. The old airport terminal near Tallulah, LA, where Delta Airlines started decades ago, had zinc roof tiles shaped to look like clay tiles.

It's sad to see a town like Berlin heading downhill, but what can replace traditional industries that employed a large workforce? Berlin was once called "Papertown,"but that era ended years ago. The last paper mill in northern New Hampshire, the Fraser Papers mill in Gorham, south of the Berlin-Gorham line, just closed. In Berlin's case, prisons provide some employment but the employment numbers are minor compared to the thousands who once cut and processed timber. You can read about Berlin in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin,_New_Hampshire

All photographs taken with a Fuji F31fd digital camera.