Thousands of the people of this city are to-day in absolute want.
The storm which has raged for several days past with great fury had driven the water of Lake Pontchartrain over the low swamp lands that intervene between the city proper and the lake, and caused the Old and New canals to overflow their banks, thereby inundating a large section of the city and inflicting great damage and suffering upon many thousands of people who, surrounded as they are by water, are unable to help themselves or to stir from their partially submerged domiciles to procure the necessaries of life.
By far the largest proportion of the sufferers are poor people who earn a bare subsistence by hard daily labor, and this sudden inundation deprives them of the opportunity to work and of bread to eat.
For three long days now these unfortunate people have been shut up in their little houses, without fire, almost if not quite without food, many of them without the money to purchase the simplest necessaries of life, and with no means to move about to secure supplies even if they had the money. Many families have had to take refuge in the second stories, or, where buildings are only one story, in the lofts, and even on the roofs, and we have no words to convey to our readers the extent and character of the suffering which is at this moment being endured within a stone's throw of the very centre of this great city.
“This
great city” was none other than New Orleans; the year, 1881. Several
days after the above article appeared in the Democrat,
Lafcadio Hearn offered
recommendations in the City Item on how New Orleanians
might in the future avoid
the human suffering and property damage due to flooding.
Excelsior!The repeated inundations to which the city has been subjected at intervals for more than a century, do not seem to have taught the people of New Orleans any lessons whatever in regard to house-building.
We believe that the construction of all dwelling houses beyond Rampart street, for example, should be hereafter regulated by certain judicious laws. Even if the line be drawn at Claiborne street an immense improvement might be accomplished.
We are not speaking of large brick or stone mansions, whose lower floors are usually well elevated above the soil surface, but more especially of frame cottages, such as thousands upon thousands of our poorer classes live in. There is no reason why some such laws as we hint of should not be passed; for the property holders themselves would be the gainers in the end.
Most of our readers must have remarked in various parts of the city on certain fine old French residences, with spacious halls, generously wide staircases, immense rooms, great breadth and depth of construction,—yet all supported upon brick archways. Those who built those houses were sensible people.
In this climate it is not healthy to sleep or live upon a ground floor, whether during a hot summer or a damp and foggy winter; and all the stoves and grates in the building can not maintain heat enough to make a ground floor perfectly healthy.
Now, we would advocate that all buildings hereafter constructed beyond a certain limit, should be raised upon brick arches, or upon a strong wooden framework, above all possible flood level. Had this been always done there would be no such misery in New Orleans as there is to-day, no serious damage to domestic property by the flood, no risk of life, no climbing upon roofs to escape drowning, no compulsory abandonment of houses, no destruction of furniture or even extinction of fires. Hundreds of persons in whose constitutions the seeds of death have been sown by exposure might have retained health and strength enough to live to a good old age, and there would be no demand upon our citizens as there now is to aid a homeless and starving multitude.
By such a system of building the health of the city would certainly be much improved. The dampness of a miasmatic soil would not penetrate into the homes of the poor; and the air, freely circulating beneath the dwelling, would insure dryness and comfort within so long as windows and doors abut well in winter and fuel is not wanting.
The house-owners themselves, as we have already said, would be the ultimate gainers. In the first place they could keep houses permanently tenanted all the year around, when they are at present vacant for several months in this year; and they could even slightly raise the price of rent, if they chose. In the second place, the cost of keeping houses in repair would be greatly diminished.
In Northern and in most Western States a solid wooden floor will last for a great number of years. Here the wood work of ground floors has to be renewed at very brief intervals. Even the supports which rest upon the damp ground rot through and through and become spongy as tinder. The planks yield, rot, and give way under the foot. Every spring here they have to put down new flooring at a large cost in all parts of the city. And in the course of twenty years the cost of such repairs rises to a figure incredibly larger than would have been the cost of raising the house to a level which would have kept the flooring dry, tough, and enduring.
We may not be able to do like Chicago, raise our whole city; but we might raise our dwellings in future above flood level, and even above the level of those rain-floods which often compel people to wade home who do not live more than two or three squares above Rampart. Should the project of raising the ground level be ever seriously entertained, the elevation of houses hereafter constructed would aid the execution project greatly. With wise and well enforced laws on the subject, all the cottages and small dwellings of the district recently inundated might be raised above the highest flood level before the expiration of twenty-five years.
— Lafcadio Hearn (uncollected), City Item, February 10, 1881
The same issue of the City Item featured on its cover the last one of Hearn's columns illustrated with his own woodcut, “The Inundations”:
