Minutes later the bones of the men who had died on that Sunday morning in 1941, ash-gray bones that had rested undisturbed for most of a century, began drifting up on the beach.

FRIDAY, JULY 11. MORGAN CITY, LOUISIANA

The early afternoon sun was sparking diamonds of light in the ripples of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River. It was twenty minutes after one on a steamy July afternoon. A cloud bank the color of hardened cement was forming on the horizon. The shrimpers were mostly out of port working, but a threatening weather forecast had limited the number of pleasure boats on the river. In the nearby swamps, visitors drawn to the area by the popular cable program Swamp People were happily slapping mosquitoes as flat-bottomed boats glided through the dense marshes. Just a bit downriver, the chinquapin run had just begun on Flat Lake and fishermen were pulling out panfish fast as they could toss a line, while paddlers and kayakers were working their way across the four-mile-wide lake. On the banks of the river, small groups of picnickers and sun worshipers were resting on blankets and brightly colored towels.

The boaters, the fishermen, the picnickers, and the sunbathers had no way of knowing that almost thirty miles upstream, without warning, nine of the eleven 44-foot-wide concrete and steel gates comprising the massive Old River Control Structure had begun rising, freeing the pent-up power of the mighty Mississippi. Billions of gallons of water surged through the opening gates, following the natural course of the river, creating a massive wave of churning energy.

The Army Corps of Engineers had built the ORCS in the 1950s to control the Mississippi River, to prevent it from joining the Atchafalaya channel and carving a new shorter, steeper path directly to the Gulf of Mexico. It had mostly successfully fought nature, keeping the Great Muddy on its historic path between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Designed partially by Hans Albert Einstein, son of the great mathematician, it had corralled the Mississippi River system, ensuring it would remain the world’s most significant navigable river highway.

The shift supervisor in the control room made a heroic but futile effort to override the system, trying desperately to manually close the gates. There was no response. Finally, cursing with the frustration of a doomed pilot in the last seconds of flight, he activated the emergency warning system.

“Oh my god,” he whispered, watching the raging waters overwhelming the Atchafalaya.

The people along the banks of the river or at play on Flat Lake and other nearby lakes may have noticed the leaves of the cypress trees rustling. Some of them certainly would have felt a new urgency in the gentle current. In Morgan City, a broken traffic signal had caused an irritating traffic backup, and several motorists began honking.

Those people on the river heard it first. A growing rumble, as if a fleet of jumbo jets was thundering across the sky. Then they would have felt the river rising. The massive wave hit Morgan City first; within minutes the curious trickle of water in the streets had become a flood, catching people in their cars or in shops, overturning trucks and buses and smashing them into storefronts, an unstoppable rage carrying tons of debris and bodies into Flat Lake.