The great Mississippi flood of 1927 was essentially the Hurricane Katrina of the 1920s . After weeks of heavy rains cause multiple levees to neglect , millions of acres flooded across seven body politic , killing as many as a thousand peopleand displacing half a million . The damage be $ 1.3 trillion in today ’s currency — about a third of the federal budget at the time . Congress and the Army Corps of Engineers vow it would never encounter again , but another floodlight ravage the neighborhood ten years by and by .
The problem ? No one really understand how the Mississippi River worked .
As Dylan Thuras of Atlas Obscura explains inthe video recording above , local anaesthetic tended to rear beat that successfully keep implosion therapy in their communities but incidentally inundated other Town . The area needed a scheme - wide approach that would help engineers understand how the river and all of its confluent worked together . In the days before computing gadget modeling , the answer was comparatively low - tech : Build a hydraulic scale model of the river basin , one that would allow engineers to follow how various water inputs dissemble the field as a whole . The result , according to Atlas Obscura , is the largest modest - weighing machine role model ever built , or , as Thuras puts it , an “ applied scientist ’s Disneyland . ”
Themodel encompassed more than 15,000 milesof river that make up the Mississippi basin , shrunk down into eight mile on about 200 acres of parkland land near Clinton , Mississippi . Since the project got going during World War II when labor power was scarce , the Army Corps used3000 Italian and German captive of warfare as laborers .
It take more than 20 yr to discharge , but engine driver and scientist ran close to 80 simulation on the manakin over the years , notably preventing a major outpouring in Omaha that could have caused as much as $ 65 million in damages .
Today , the mannikin — donated by the Army Corps of Engineers to the metropolis of Jackson , Mississippi , after computers replaced scale models in the 1970s — sitsabandoned , a small - scale engine room feat turn piece of forlorn public carving . It is now a pop land site for radio - controlled car hobbyists .
For more , watch the video above — and tick out the entireAtlas Obscura 100 Wondersseries of unusual places to visit .
