Radio Speech of Senator Harry S. Truman at New Orleans, Louisiana

RAD IO SPEECH OF HONORABLE HARRY S. TRUMAN ON IMPORTANCE OF FLOOD CONTROL To be released on delivery at New Orleans, October 12, 1944 at 7:30 a.m. Central War Time For five years I have attended the sessions of the Mississioni Valley Flood Control Association, and have found them most instructive. I am attending them this year, even in the midst of an election campaign, because I believe that flood control is one of our most important problems, and because I believe that their your activities are truly a service to the whole nation. Water under control is our gfeatest asset. Without it we could not live, But not even fire is more terrible or destructive than raging floods. We all recall the great flood on the Mississioni River in 1927. 700,000 peoble were driven from of their homes. More than a quarter million livestock were drowned. And more than four million acres of crops were destroyed. Terrible as that disa ster was, it was only the greatest of a large number of floods that for years had devastated our great river valleys, the most fertile land in the United States. The loss was not confined to the hardshivs of the beople in the lower reaches of the river valleys who were flooded out. A less immediate and less spectacular but enormously important loss was sustained by those in the upper valleys as far north as Minnesota. They suffered from soil erosion, declining fertility of the land, a lowering of the ground water level and a loss of water that could have been used to great advantage for power, navigation and irrigation purposes. For examole, the United States Department of Agriculture in August, 1928 the year after the great flood estimated that soil erosion alone was costing the farmers two hundred million dollars a year. The cost of prover flood control would be great, just as the cost of insurance premiums is great. But the returns from sound flood control tractices can exceed the cost. Through intelligent action, a national scourge can be turned into a national asset of the first magnitude. From the great flood of 1927 we learned once and for all that we could not safely rely upon building bigger and higher levees to contain the floods. That course only raised the water levels and made the floods even more dangerous when they finally broke through the levees.