Sauvé's Crevasse

But the swamp rapidly filled; the water approached the outskirts of the town; and it was quickly too late to throw up any adequate defenses.

The First Municipality went to work on a small levee which lay along the lower bank of the Carondelet Canal, and raised it sufficiently to shut out the flood from that part of the city.

The water spread from the low-lying "back of town" into the higher ground closer to the River, and attained its highest point on May 30.

Then two engineers, George T. Dunbar and Surgi, undertook the task, and with carte blanche as to methods and materials, succeeded after seventeen days in stanching the flood on June 20, 1849.

Heavy rains washed away the mud deposited by the flood, and the city began to resume its normal aspect.

In 1850 the Second Municipality found it necessary to levy a special tax of $400,000 to offset "actual expenditures on streets, wharves and crevasses."

Katrina flooded a larger total urban area, but much of what would later become the city of New Orleans and its suburbs in Jefferson Parish was still swampland in May 1849.