The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 will go down in history as one of America's greatest peacetime disasters. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, the river swelled to 80 miles wide. More than 23,000 square miles (60,000 square km) of land was submerged, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, and some 250 people died. The media coverage gave citizens outside the flood zone, especially in the North and West, a great deal of time to think out loud about the distressed South. The flood inundated 16 million acres of land, displacing nearly 640,000 people in states from Illinois to Louisiana. Eighty years later, this retrospective reviews the 1927 Great Mississippi Flood, assesses the long-term impact of the event on flood risk management in the U.S., considers the potential for levee failures during future Mississippi floods, and estimates the economic costs that would be Mississippi River flood of 1927, also called Great Flood of 1927, flooding of the lower Mississippi River valley in April 1927, one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States.