Before Hurricane Katrina, There Was the Great Levee Breach of 1849

On May 3, 1849, a New Orleans plantation owner named Pierre Sauvé lost a battle with the Mississippi River.  

Sauvé’s sugar plantation was located along a sharp bend (or “cutback”) in the mighty river. For months, Sauvé watched anxiously as the water levels of the Mississippi continued to rise. Like other private landowners along the Mississippi, it was Sauvé's responsibility to keep the swollen river from flooding its banks.  

On Sauvé’s plantation, enslaved workers had already built a 4-foot earthen levee between the river and his sugar fields. But 1849 was a record year for precipitation in the Mississippi watershed, and throughout the spring the river kept rising and putting more pressure on that cutback. Suavé’s mud-and-sticks levee didn’t have a chance. 

On May 3, the river bulldozed a hole through Sauvé’s manmade barrier. In 19th-century parlance, a breach in a levee was called a crevasse. Within days, “Sauvé’s Crevasse” measured 150-feet wide and 6 feet deep. The water roared through the opening with such violence that the churning whitewater became a local tourist attraction—the Niagara Falls of New Orleans.  

“Crevasses were a common phenomenon in Louisiana,” says Richard Campanella, a geographer with the Tulane University School of Architecture. “It just so happens that 1849 was a particularly bad year in an era of high-water events on the Mississippi. Sauvé’s Crevasse was the worst of them, both in terms of how big of a rupture it was, but also because its location meant that the water pouring through would flood New Orleans.” 

New Orleans—originally Nouvelle-Orléans—was founded in 1717 by French explorer named Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville. From the moment de Bienville saw the site, which was previously a Quinnipissas Indian village, he understood its strategic importance to France. Whoever controlled the mouth of the Mississippi—where the river emptied into the Gulf of Mexico—controlled access to the vast interior of North America. 

But de Bienville also understood geography. He knew that building a city in a low-lying area at the convergence of a river, a swamp and an ocean was a recipe for disaster. Earlier reports from French traders said the Mississippi regularly flooded its banks every spring and that the site was unsuitable for settlement.  

De Bienville knew the risks when he founded New Orleans, but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to build a French stronghold at the mouth of the Mississippi. So he searched for the highest, driest land he could find. It wasn’t where he expected.  

"The Mississippi River is the chief agent of land construction in the delta,” says Campanella. “When the river floods, it deposits sediment along its banks. What that creates is this paradoxical situation where the areas closest to the river are actually the highest.” 

De Bienville had no choice but to build the city of New Orleans alongside the Mississippi River. It was either that or the swamp. But knowing that the river would overflow its banks, de Bienville immediately called for the construction of a levee (from the French word lever, meaning “to raise”).  

The first levee in New Orleans was built in 1719—a low earthen embankment that shored up the riverbank for about a mile. In 1722, city planners laid out a grid of 40 city blocks and dug drainage ditches around each block to redirect floodwaters to the surrounding swamps.  

As the city grew, the levees got longer and higher. By 1726, one section of the levee near modern-day Jackson Square was already 18 feet tall. All around the city, farmers established plantations in the fertile lowlands, draining the swamps and barricading the river with levees built by enslaved workers.  

The artificial levees disrupted the natural cycle of the Mississippi. When the river swelled in the spring, the water could no longer top the riverbank and drain into the wetlands. By building levees to protect New Orleans from periodic floods, the city was setting itself up for disaster.  

In 1846, a Louisiana state engineer named P.O. Hébert issued a prescient warning.  

“Every day, levees are extended higher and higher up the river—natural outlets closed—and every day the danger to the city of New Orleans and to all the lower country is increased,” said Hébert. “Who can calculate the loss by an overflow to the city of New Orleans alone?” 

In the mid-19th century, the city government of New Orleans did not take responsibility for building artificial levees along the Mississippi River. That obligation was handed to individual plantation owners, who had settled along the Mississippi all the way from Baton Rouge to the Gulf of Mexico.  

“The river is manageable 99 percent of the time,” says Campanella, “so like most people, the plantation owners would have done ‘just enough’ to maintain their levees. There were levee inspectors at the local level, but they didn’t necessarily adhere to the same standards. As a result, these artificial levees had nowhere near the strength and the height that they’d later attain.” 

On Pierre Sauvé’s plantation, his 4-foot earthen levee certainly wasn’t up to the task. In the spring of 1849, the Mississippi River was running high and fast. For weeks before the breach, the river steadily hollowed out Sauvé’s levee from behind until it finally caved in on May 3, releasing a torrent of water through the widening breach.   

It took days for the floodwaters from Sauvé’s Crevasse to reach New Orleans. But when they did, the rising water quickly swallowed up the poorer low-lying neighborhoods of the city before reaching Bourbon Street. As water rushed through the open crevasse, it flooded more than 200 city blocks in New Orleans and displaced an estimated 12,000 people. The floodwaters were 6 feet deep in some places.  

On June 4, a month after the levee was breached, a reporter from the Daily Picayune climbed to the roof of the St. Charles hotel—the highest point in the city—and described the scene around him: “New Orleans [looks like] the city of Venice.” 

As efforts failed to close the gaping crevasse, the source of New Orleans’ misery became a tourist attraction.  

"People would buy tickets on a small steamer and kind of hover outside the crevasse,” says Campanella, author of Draining New Orleans: The 300-Year Quest to Dewater the Crescent City. "They’d get to see the churning water and the rapids and the spray—all of which are novelties in lower Louisiana. Meanwhile, there were these workers frantically trying to plug the hole.”  

After 48 straight days of flooding, the Mississippi River finally got low enough for engineers to install a floodgate at Sauvé’s Crevasse. But it would take many more weeks for the city of New Orleans to fully drain and dry out.  

Incredibly, nobody died in the New Orleans flood of 1849, although tensions ran high. Without help from the city government, many residents built their own levees in the streets with sandbags, and some New Orleanians formed armed posses to protect their homes. It was lucky no one was killed. 

Sauve’s Crevasse wasn’t the last major levee breach to hit New Orleans—the 1858 Bell Crevasse, for example, remained open for six months—but the 1849 flood became a rallying cry for improved flood mitigation and greater government oversight of the levee system.  

“Over the next decades, even during the tumult of the Civil War, people in New Orleans would say, ‘We don’t want another Sauvé’s Crevasse,’” says Campanella.  

First, the city of New Orleans took responsibility for levee construction and maintenance. Then in 1879, the U.S. government formed the Mississippi River Commission, which sent trained engineers to advise local authorities on improved levee standards.  

Ultimately, it required yet another disaster to push through the biggest policy changes. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was arguably the worst flood in U.S. history, displacing more than 700,000 people across 11 states, including Louisiana. Several levee breaches and failures contributed to the devastation.  

In response, Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1928, transferring the responsibility of building and maintaining levees along the entire Mississippi River to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In August 2005, levees and floodwalls in New Orleans and surrounding areas failed in more than 50 locations during Hurricane Katrina, flooding 80 percent of the city.