The town of Greenville, Mississippi had been wet for months.

It had been storming in America since the fall before, and the river had been rising and rising.

This is author and journalist Bois Uphold.

The year was 1927.

If you walk on top of the leve levee you could feel the soils shaking because they were so

water-logged for months and months water had been pressing against this levee and like pouring

through these soils. That rising river?

It's the Mississippi.

And on this day in April, it looked like a scene out of a war movie.

At that levy, it was just raucous with activity.

People were up there stacking sandbags, piling them up trying to make sure that the river as it kept rising and rising and rising wasn't going to pour over and inundate this town.

Just north of Greenville, a worker saw what everyone had been worried about, a crack in the

soil.

We have reports from this, you know, someone saw it coming and said, well, she can't hold it much longer.

And then all of a sudden, the water pours through, rips through these sandbags, and then rips through the levy.

And in a pretty short period of time this giant pile of earth just becomes this massive torrent bigger than Niagara Falls. People in the town of Greenville watched entire homes float by, Dead livestock, human bodies.

The thing that strikes me the most of the metaphors people made about the sound.

People said it was like a train, it was like a snarling beast,

it was the sound of this water roaring through that and then slipping towards all these

different farms and small towns in the delta.

Like many rivers, it's natural for the Mississippi to flood, but this was just the beginning.

By the end of that spring, the levy lining the lower portion of the Mississippi had broken in 200 different places.

...