DISASTER: Too Much & Too Little

In Kansas and Missouri, sweat-stained thousands set out to clear their homes after the nation’s costliest flood. In the muck and debris left by receding waters, people fought rats, flies and fumes from gas leaks. Raging waters of the Kaw and the Missouri had killed 41 people, sent 500,000 fleeing, caused $875 million damage, flooded 2,000,000 acres. While the flood rolled on —less dangerously—into the Mississippi and past St. Louis, local, state and federal officials began to discuss what could be done for the future. Major General Lewis A. Pick, Chief of Army Engineers, told the congressional committee that the whole disaster might have been averted had $300 million been appropriated for flood-control projects in that area under the Pick-Sloan Plan. But that was not done because there was local opposition to using large areas of farm land for reservoirs, differences of opinion on how the job should be administered, people who thought the plan too ambitious and too full of pork barrel. Said General Pick: Let’s get going now.

In Arizona last week, Phoenix Weatherman J. R. Jurwitz asked, “Why can’t God give us some of that Missouri water?” Residents looked up at smoke-hazed skies and prayed for rain. Drought is now in its tenth year of creeping paralysis. Forest fires burned 26,450 Arizona acres in June and are roaring on. (New Mexico, Washington, Oregon and California also had drought-born forest fires.) “It’s so dry, a hot breath could start a fire,” said one ranger.

Water is being trucked to small towns. Arizona’s rainfall in all of 1950 was 7.5 inches, the lowest on record (in the Kansas-Missouri flood, 12 inches fell in 72 hours). Overplanting of cotton, overgrazing of cattle is depleting the ground water supply. Arizona’s $300 million agricultural economy is in peril from the years of dryness, and some alarmed Arizonans fear a general exodus from the state if rain doesn’t come.