I still do not understand how flooding one part of a city would save another part?
Can anyone help my unreasonable, obviously stupid brain?
Breaking one levee can allow water from Lake Ponchartrain or Mississippi River to be released and relieve the pressure on other levees. However, it would not have been performed on the east side of the 17th Street Canal obviously which resulted in all of N.O. flooding. One would look at the east side of Intracoastal Canal to flood lower 9th ward which is close to area that flooded during Betsy.
BTW the ones who told me that people did this very thing during Betsy did not live in the 9th Ward. It was told by those who lived in N.O. and were spared by the flooding. They viewed it as a leg amputation to save the patient. It was not the claim of those who flooded but the claim by those who were spared the flooding. I was told this so much growing up that I actually accepted it as fact until much later.