Sauvé's Crevasse was the last Mississippi River levee failure to flood much of New Orleans. It started May 3, 1849 when the spring floods broke through the levee at Pierre Sauvé's plantation in what is now River Ridge. Flooding filled the back swamp and threatened the rest of ths city until the First Municipality raised a small levee along the Carondelet Canal and shunted the waters out of town through Bayou St. John. Although the city east of Canal Street was saved, much of Carrollton (to Oak Street), Uptown (to Magazine) and the CBD (to Baronne) were badly flooded.
Waring & Cable (Social Statistics of Cities, Reports on New
Orleans) reported, "About 220 inhabited squares were flooded, more than
2,000 tenements were surrounded by water, and a population of near
12,000 souls either driven from their homes or living an aquatic life
of much privation and suffering." This figure may be only for the city
of New Orleans as then constituted, with its upper limit at Felicity
Street; much of what would later become Uptown New Orleans was then the
towns of Lafayette, Bologny, Jefferson, and Carrollton.
It was June 20th before local engineers were able to seal the crevasse and the city began to return to normal. The flooding did not totally disappear for a month. There was no state or federal aid so residents of the heavily damaged Second Municipality faced a special
tax of $400,000 to offset "actual expenditures on streets, wharves and
crevasses."
While New Orleans has experienced numerous floods large and small in
its history, the flood of 1849 was of a more disastrous scale than any
save Katrina. Luckily, much of what would
become the city of New Orleans and the suburbs in Jefferson Parish was
still undeveloped swamp.
The water level of the Mississippi flooding which flowed into the city was higher than that experienced after Katrina. This is particularly evident in areas of Uptown where detailed
comparisons can be made; deeper water levels were recorded in 1849 in
places which flooded in both disasters, and the flooding of 1849
extended into a significant part of Uptown that remained above the
flooding of 2005.
New Orleans has not experienced flooding from the Mississippi River
since Sauvé's Crevasse. Even the Great Flood of 1927, which was allowed to flood much of St. Bernard Parish, was not able to enter the city.
Parts of this article are from Wikipedia online Sauve's Crevasse made available for reproduction here under the terms of the GFDL. Much of the article was adapted from History of New Orleans by John Kendall, 1922. This work is now in the public domain from expired copyright.