Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
citizens who lived across the river from Augusta were relocated, but not by the federal gov-
ernment and not to make way for a massive structural flood control project.
Floods had inundated Hamburg prior to the Great Flood of 1929. The headquarters and
local chapters of the American Red Cross had rendered aid on multiple occasions to about
eighty African American families. Most of the men worked in brick manufacturing, and
many of the women cultivated large gardens and sold produce across the river in Augusta
markets. After one spring flood a Red Cross official took the time to explain why Afric-
an Americans continued to return to the floodplain after floodwaters receded. Residents
did not like living in harm's way, but they occupied their homes “practically rent free.”
Other Red Cross personnel expressed frustration over the residents' perceived “indiffer-
ence and insistance [
sic
] in residing in this constantly threatened territory.” White observ-
ers, however, missed African Americans' pragmatic and rational economic decisions; they
were “not only out of sympathy with [African Americans] but are really indignant,” ac-
the victims without considering the broader racial, economic, and structural factors that in-
fluenced African Americans' settlement in a vulnerable place like Hamburg. None of the
Red Cross responders identified Augusta's levee as a risk management technology that pro-
duced the risk of flooding in Hamburg. And Hamburg's African American residents had
limited housing choices and economic reasons not to relocate after previous floods. The
consequences of the double storms and Great Flood of 1929, however, were different.
The collective labor of black and white citizens working across the “color line” saved
the Georgia levee from total collapse and paved the way for a new Hamburg in South Caro-
Augusta Red Cross chapter members balked at providing aid that would encourage Ham-
burg residents to reoccupy the floodplain. Less than one month after the Great Flood of
1929, a solution emerged. Charles W. Carr, the official Washington, D.C., Red Cross envoy
in Augusta, and white and black businessmen all agreed that relocation was “the only way
ents from Hamburg to Carpentersville on Shoats Hill, about one mile away and eighty feet
above the floodplain on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River. The assumption
was that the Red Cross could purchase and subdivide six acres into at least twenty-two in-
dividual properties. Given the options, the history of flooding, and the legacy of floodplain
occupation, the Red Cross chose a decidedly nontechnological option to remove people
from harm's way.
64
Newspapers soon began to report on a new Hamburg on the plateau above the Savannah
River's floodplain after the Red Cross agents negotiated purchase of a few acres that had
misleading language, an Augusta journalist explained that “the land on which these humble
