Floods’ Deepest Scars Left on Smallest Scales

The last crest is passing now, the rivers falling. The driving rains are giving way to the humid dog days that are the hallmarks of summer in the upper Midwest.

As the water recedes, the true toll of the Great Floods of 1993 is finally starting to emerge. By the time the final feeble crest rolls past Cairo, Ill., on Monday, the rivers will have flooded more than 23,500 square miles of land, an area that, if combined, would exceed Lake Michigan.

Yet it is a catastrophe that left its deepest scars on the smallest of scales. The floods’ sweep can be measured most acutely in miniature--in individual lives lost, backwater towns that may be wiped off the map, sub-sectors of commerce ruined, slivers of public policy altered.

In the flood zones--in the Gumbo Flats of Chesterfield, Mo., where dank Missouri River water has overtaken the Spirit of St. Louis Airport and risen to the wingtips of small planes, and in Wever, Iowa, where egrets glide where Bud Pieper’s cornstalks once waved--the story is not over, and will not be for months.

“There’s so much we don’t know,” said Bob Davis, the Alexandria, Mo., mayor who now presides over a community covered by 14 feet of Mississippi water and mud. “The present’s bad enough, but it’s the future, it’s all that you don’t know, that kills you.”

Yet on a national and a regional level, the overall financial impact of two months of flooding may not mirror the harrowing images of “high water everywhere,” as Mississippi blues musician Charley Patton sang of the Mississippi River flood of 1927.

Damage estimates from this year’s deluge range as high as $15 billion, but economists have yet to agree on the real extent of monetary loss.

After the soil is re-plowed, the wild animals return to revitalized forests and thousands of flooded homes are repaired or bulldozed, many officials wonder if the long-term fallout from the floods will turn out to be surprisingly mild.

“The personal losses associated with the floods are tremendous,” said Diane Swonk, an economist with First Chicago Bank. “But on a macroeconomic level, it’s a different story,” mitigated by middling flood damage to infrastructure, lush crop yields for farmers on high ground and expectations of windfall gains for construction firms and other industries angling for a role in the recovery.

In Washington and in Midwestern state capitals, concern about budget deficits is forcing politicians to take a hard look at the extent of government responsibility in defraying disaster costs--even as flood-racked constituents plead for more aid.

Major population centers, such as Des Moines, Iowa, and St. Louis, shaken by their close calls with chaos, are reassessing their reliance on rivers that have provided transportation, recreation and solace all these years.

Des Moines, which lost its water system for two weeks, its power for two days and many of its levees, is undergoing a major analysis of its most vital city services.

“We’re making everybody go back and re-examine the flood protection methods that are used,” said City Planning Director Jim Grant. The city’s flood control system had gaps, he said, “that shouldn’t occur again.”

Along the Mississippi, the great surges of water that wreaked so much damage on the land apparently did little to alter the face of the river. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers surveyors have already sailed out on the swollen river in flatboats, taking soundings from the silt-caked bottoms and bends.

Corps of Engineers officials said they expect no lasting channel changes north of St. Louis, where surging floodwaters altered the course of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers so that they now flow together as the “Missourippi.”

“The two rivers will go back to their old beds by the end of August,” said Corps of Engineers hydrologist Gary Dyhouse. “The Missouri has been dropping one foot a day since Monday.” He expects another 10 days should take it below flood stage.

Dick Baker, a Corps of Engineers dredging coordinator, said that although the Mississippi River is receding slowly, its speed is not sluggish enough to allow for a natural re-scouring of silt that has collected on the river bottom over the past month.

That means the Corps of Engineers may end up spending far more on dredging the river than it would like--substantially in excess of the $1 million in dredging costs incurred in a normal year, he said.

The flood has both bolstered and sapped the sense of community in the Mississippi’s river towns. Even as residents in places like Niota, Ill., and Alexandria vow to rebuild their water- and mud-choked towns, politicians and activist groups have begun earnest discussions about whether some towns have a future at all.

As they grope to rebuild, public officials and townspeople alike are confronting unsettling questions: Should the levees be built higher? Should they be replaced at all? Should building be permitted in the lowlands? Should those areas be reverted to wetlands, the better to absorb the river’s overreaches?

“The discussions are incredibly intense,” said Dave Baker, an agricultural engineering specialist for the Missouri Extension Service. “The future of dozens of small towns are tied up in these questions, and just the fact that people are talking about it makes a lot of other people uncomfortable.”

The crazy-quilt impact of the floods is visible in the course it carved across the Midwest, trailing serpentine zones of destruction that snarled out like tree branches from the swollen central limb of the Mississippi.

According to the National Weather Service, the floods began on June 8, when the Minnesota River washed over the small farming town of Jordan, Minn. The same day, a storm front clamped down over the Midwest, unleashing 3 1/2 inches of rain on Prairie City, Iowa, and 4.6 inches on Burr Ridge, Ill.

The whole countryside seemed to turn out to fill, haul and heave sandbags. More than 30 million bags were distributed by the Corps of Engineers and millions more were handed out by government and relief agencies. Amish farmers joined the townspeople of Canton, Mo., and the Mormons of Nauvoo helped neighbors in Niota, Ill. A Las Vegas gambler fled the crap tables to shovel sand in West Quincy, Mo., and a Philadelphia poet joined the sandbag line at the Sny Island Levee near Fall Creek, Ill.

Yet despite all their work, more than 800 levees--ranging from the great municipal flood walls of St. Louis to private sandbag barriers in St. Charles, Mo.--were either breached, topped or damaged by the flood, Dave Baker said.

Of those levees, only 140 are likely to be covered by federal aid, confronting many river towns and agricultural levee districts with the choice of either finding money to repair their levees or jeopardizing their community’s future by leaving them in a state of disrepair.

In Missouri and other flood-swept states, congressional delegations are preparing to use their leverage to win federal help for levees that do not qualify for immediate aid.

“We need that river, those towns and that agricultural entity to return to what it was,” Dave Baker said.

Approach the Mississippi or Missouri rivers--or the Illinois, the Skunk, the Nishabotna, any of the major tributaries that raged out of control--and the tangible damage numbs the soul.

Thousands of productive farms have vanished under the floodwaters; 127 small towns were evacuated and some were left submerged, marked only by their idled grain elevators; 48 lives were lost, swept under treacherous currents.

More than 46,000 people suffered damage to their homes, Red Cross officials report. At least 18,000 displaced people have moved into 120 relief shelters, while tens of thousands more are said to be living with relatives, sleeping in church basements or settling for the foreseeable future in Spartan government-owned trailers.

“I don’t ever want to go through this again,” said Carol Nash, who had escaped to a levee command post in Valmeyer, Mo., after watching two houses and an interior decorating business succumb last week to the Mississippi’s final throes of fury.

Yet just a few miles from the flood zone, high and dry on a limestone bluff in Quincy, Ill., softball games proceeded uninterrupted. In St. Louis, ringed by watery chaos, the annual Strassefest, with its German beer hall anthems and flowing taps, went on as usual.

Safe on a hill in Nauvoo, above the torrent below, a bartender at Dottie’s Red Front Saloon laughed at the notion of a flood in town: “If it reaches here, you’d better get out Noah’s ark.”

Creativity flowered in the chaos. Bridge closures along 250 miles of the Mississippi forced commuters to literally wing it, riding volunteer airlifts between Quincy, Ill., and Hannibal, Mo. The loss of water in Des Moines prodded thousands of residents to shower at friends’ homes. More than 6,000 riders commuted in one day on a rusty electric trolley traveling over the top of the hydroelectric dam at Keokuk, Iowa.

Down in the flood plains, there was little to ease the pain of loss and the worry about what might come next. The floodwaters may be receding, but weather experts are cautioning that the threat of more high water will hang over the lowlands for up to a year.

Any new rainfall that exceeds three to four inches in a month would cause the rivers to swell again in the most devastated areas, said Lee Larson, central region hydrologist for the National Weather Service.

The ground along the Mississippi and other flooded rivers is so saturated and the water table so high that the threat of heavy spring floods next year remains a distinct possibility.

“It takes four things to make a flood: wet soil, high base flows in the river, heavy snow cover, rain,” Larson said. “We’ve already got two of the four.”

That peril only adds to the anxiety of people who agonize over their communities’ very existence.

Residents of some towns know their communities are doomed by the flood. In northern Jefferson City, Mo., in a neighborhood known as Cedar City, public officials have already begun preparing 350 flooded-out residents for the certainty that they won’t go home again.

Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.) and other elected officials are making inquiries into the amount of federal funding it will take to relocate the town’s families and buy up their land for use as a catch basin.

“It’s sad to think that Cedar City might have to die,” said Mary Bertel, a Jefferson City councilwoman who represents the area. “This was a thriving community for 80 years. When you lose towns like these, you lose your sense of place.”

Most river people say they hope to repair their levees and see the flood plains bloom again. But the financial burden of rebuilding may overwhelm many devastated small-town governments.

Deprived of a tax base by the floods’ damage, dependent on a federal government reluctant to pick up the entire tab for disaster relief and confronted by environmental activists and others who question whether the lowlands should be revived at all, many small-town officials say they fear the rivers will become their communities’ watery graves.

The 500 residents of Alexandria scattered across the hilly countryside of northern Missouri after their town fell to the relentless Mississippi. Some are camped out in government trailers. Most have moved in with relatives and friends. Alexandria’s Mayor Davis is staying in his brother’s house outside neighboring Wayland.

“The people of Alexandria want to come back, they have to come back,” Davis said.

But there is no certainty of that. The town had just spent much of its capital, $500,000, to blacktop its gravel-surface roads, install new pumps on its levee and start work on a community center. The flood took it all, scouring away the roads, clogging the pumps with black gumbo soil and crumbling the new hall.

Like the mayors of many devastated towns, Davis said he simply does not know what to do. New taxes are out of the question. “Who can I tax?” he asked. “We’re all wiped out.”

Under the federal disaster relief program, the government pays 75% of rebuilding costs--but only if states and municipalities absorb the other 25%. That would impose a staggering debt on Alexandria, Davis said, forcing it to attempt to float new municipal bonds--another thorny prospect.

In Iowa, Gov. Terry E. Branstad has already said he plans to lobby hard with other Midwestern officials for a waiver of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s rebuilding formula.

“We’re talking about $100 million (in losses) here,” Branstad said. “In Florida, there was a waiver after Hurricane Andrew. (A similar waiver) could bring us down to $7 million.”

No amount of aid will compensate for the floods’ most devastating toll: the deaths of 48 Midwesterners who drowned under overpowering currents. Some simply underestimated river speeds, others were trapped as they tried to retrieve possessions from flooded homes. The river took them, just as it had taken the land.

On the afternoon of July 26, Gary Fillpot, 26, of Rich Hill, Mo., went fishing for carp with friends on the humble Marais des Cygnes River, about an hour south of Kansas City. Trying to lance a carp with a long-tined fork, Fillpot lost his balance and fell into the swollen tributary.

Fillpot, who planned to marry Aug. 22, never had a chance.

“Everybody in town knew him,” said Charlie Simpson, who manages the Woods Supermarket where Fillpot worked. “I went to his funeral last week. It was so full I had to stand up.”

Times staff writer Richard A. Serrano and researcher Tracy Shryer contributed to this story.