Floods, Tornadoes

"Don't lose one single man, woman or child," ordered onetime Governor (now Flood Relief Director of Louisiana) John Milliken Parker last week, as flood waters broke through into central and southern Louisiana. Even as he was speaking, from 500 to 700 men, women and children were marooned on a twelve-mile remnant of what had been a 50-mile levee along the Bayou de Glaize. Scores of rescue boats struggled toward them. . . .

Meanwhile, smashing the Bayou de Glaize line of defense, flood waters swept through the sugar-belt district of Louisiana, threatened to add 125,000 new refugees to the total of flood fugitives. The Bayou de Glaize defenses ran, roughly speaking, east and west through Avoyelles Parish, about 90 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. Having broken through this line on a front of some 25 miles (in a straight east-west line) the water was expected to continue almost unhindered to the Gulf. It should empty into the Bays of Vermilion and the Cote Blanche, some 100 miles west of New Orleans.

The Avoyelles flood came from the inland sea formed by last fortnight's levee-breaks in Northern Louisiana. Through this inland sea was moving the main flood crest of the Mississippi itself, headed southeast through the Old River to the main channel of the Mississippi itself. Thus the Avoyelles flood was a sort of gigantic overflow, distinct from the central stream that raced toward Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Sweeping last week through Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri,

Illinois, tornadoes killed 255, injured more than 1,000. Hardest hit was Poplar Bluff, Mo., with 103 dead.