Midwesterners Bailing Out of Flood-Prone River Plains : Exodus: Rains push many along the Missouri, Mississippi to high ground. But farmers are staying put.

From his furnished riverfront room in the ancient Leimer Hotel, Kermit Becker knows the Missouri River is up again. Even without going to his window, Becker can tell by the faint gurgle of floodwaters rippling over the high rocks outside, driven by recent rains.

It is a telltale sound the 86-year-old river man has heard for three successive summers now, the despised watery rush that signals hard months of displacement and loss in the saturated bottom lands that fan out from the Midwest’s swollen rivers.

“The first time was bad enough, but after three years of floods, you wonder why anybody would have a mind to stay,” said Becker, who spent 40 years as a barge pilot and captain before retiring to the easy life of a river museum guide.

Life in the Midwest’s bottom lands has never really conformed to logic. Families have lived and farmed at the river’s edge for generations, defiantly returning to the soggy wreckage of their lives to rebuild again and again.

They have their reasons: The bottoms are among the lushest and most fertile fields in the Midwest, in dry years producing crop yields twice as abundant as those harvested on an acre of prairie land. And there are the ancestral ties that have kept river families rooted in the lowlands, willing to endure cycles of deluge just as Californians ride out earthquakes and Oklahomans brace each year for tornado season.

But two years after the worst Midwestern floods in modern history--and two months since heavy rains again swamped much of the Missouri flood plains and weak points along the Mississippi River--change has come to the bottom lands. Even as its farmers stubbornly cling to their sodden acreage, its river towns are emptying out.

The historic severity of the 1993 flood--which killed 50 people, swept over more than 8 million acres of land and left more than 65,000 people homeless--forced federal officials to seek new ways to prevent a repeat of that summer’s disaster. Saddled with $10 billion in flood damage, the Clinton Administration and Congress responded with a passel of untested programs aimed at reducing the ranks of future victims by trying to move residents out of harm’s way. The government also sought to buy vast tracts of farmland to create a natural wetlands buffer that could absorb the brunt of future floods.

Relocating Residents

The aggressive campaign to clear people from the lowlands appears to be paying off. Along the riverbanks of Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, as many as 45% of the bottom-land houses damaged in the 1993 flood have been bought by a consortium of federal, state and local agencies--an estimate that likely holds true throughout the Midwestern flood plains, said Francis P. Begley, a deputy director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency regional office in Kansas City.

Since 1993, the federal government has bought more than 12,000 flood-prone dwellings, paying $375 million to scatter at least 25,000 people from the flatlands.

While thousands more residents remain in the bottoms, officials say the exodus has drastically reduced the need for government disaster aid--a savings already realized during this summer’s season of high water.

“The homes aren’t there to have to deal with again,” Begley said. “Fewer lives are being disrupted and county governments won’t be so strapped for funds.”

Across the river from Hermann, in Montgomery County, Mo., more than 150 bottoms residents were displaced by the 1993 flood. This summer, said county emergency management director Ron Hansen, officials had to tend to the needs of half a dozen families--the only ones left in the county’s flood plains.

Some bottom-land towns, such as Valmeyer in southern Illinois, have relocated en masse to nearby hills, determined to maintain their communities. Other hamlets--already faced with lingering deaths as residents aged and treasuries emptied--simply withered away, as Valmeyer’s neighboring town of Fults did after most of its population scattered.

The tiny hamlet of Rhineland, Mo., which once sat in flood-washed bottom lands five miles from Hermann, is now perched on a bluff overlooking the river. Most of Rhineland’s 175 residents are moving up into the hills, where their century-old clapboard and limestone houses are being transplanted from down below.

Battered houses jut out like rickety cartoon dwellings from the bare hillside, tottering on wood pallet towers until the new town gets utilities and works out its planning kinks--a slow, agonizing process that has dogged similar moves throughout the region.

“It was nice to know this summer that, for once, I didn’t have to go through what I did two years ago,” said Severn (Wernie) Heying, who began camping in his hillside double-wide trailer even before his utilities came on. His electricity flows from a portable generator; Heying sheepishly admits he uses nearby fields--mostly at night--for temporary plumbing.

Hidden costs--those not subsidized by the town’s $1.2 million in federal relocation and rebuilding grants--have been a burden, especially those incurred by moving brittle old homes. The economic toll has been more than anyone planned--and Rhineland’s elderly population is having to foot the bill.

“Sure, there’s some grumbling,” said Mayor Ervin Elsenraat, who is still praised by the locals for keeping the town going. “But look at the places that are disappearing from the map. At least we’re still in this together.”

Like many bottoms towns in the Midwest, Rhineland is a different place than it once was, a community of people who no longer have the same ties to the land that their farming neighbors claim. As late as the 1950s, flood-plains farms were much smaller--often no larger than 80 or 100 acres--and the bottoms and neighboring towns were filled with families who made their living off the land, said Pat Glithero, a FEMA official who runs Illinois’ flood-relocation program.

Buyouts Go Slowly

As bottoms farms grew into corporate entities--like most American farms--the flood plains began losing rural population. The region’s river towns changed too, becoming repositories for retired or failed farmers and commuter families who prized riverfront life while working at factory jobs in larger cities and towns. Unlike their farming neighbors--many who long ago left for the hills--residents of towns such as Rhineland no longer felt compelled to stay when the recent floods washed in.

“The older folks remember floods where the water came in and went out fast with a little cleanup,” said Hansen, the Montgomery County emergency management director. “The 1993 flood devastated them. And if they still had any desire to stick it out, the spring floods in the last two years pretty much took it out of them. It may be fine to keep farming the bottoms, but living there?”

But even as the push to empty the bottoms proceeds, the federal government has met little success in its attempts to persuade farmers to sell off their flood-plains acreage for use as wetlands.

Despite the availability of more than $36 million in Agriculture Department and Interior Department funds for farm buyouts, only 55,000 acres of land have been bought. Millions have gone unspent--the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has used only $800,000 of its $11-million allotment for land along the Missouri, Mississippi and Iowa rivers since 1993, said Bill Harrison, the agency’s land acquisitions supervisor in Minneapolis. In Missouri, the state hardest hit by the 1993 flood and victimized again this year, state and federal wildlife and conservation agencies have used less than half of the $25 million allocated for wetlands purchases.

Officials such as Norman Stuckey, a veteran Missouri Conservation Department officer, acknowledge that farm buyouts were launched with “unrealistic expectations.” The buyout program fell victim to time and politics, officials complain. Many landowners, they say, delayed coming to terms with the government until they learned whether their flood-damaged levees would be mended--or until they pressured members of Congress to repair breached levees in danger of going unfunded.

“Once they knew the levees were coming back, there was no incentive to sell off,” Stuckey said.

Conservationists once talked loftily of transforming 120,000 acres of bottom lands. That goal is still far off, officials admit. “Every new flood changes some more minds,” said Mike Wells, assistant state conservationist for the Agriculture Department’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. “We’re taking the long view.”

In the few places where flood-plains farmers have sold their land to the government, wildlife officials say there are clear signs of the kinds of natural changes they hoped would occur. In Louisa County, Iowa, a stretch of 3,000 acres that was once prime farmland has become a new federal refuge. Inundated this summer by new flooding, the wetlands are already thick with new arrowhead and cattail plants. Waterfowl and marsh animals are showing signs of a comeback, said Tom Bell, a refuge manager for the Mark Twain National Wildlife Refuge.

“If we gave these programs a chance, they could really do wonders,” Bell said.

But in the bottoms near Rhineland, a hotbed of anti-conservation sympathies, long-settled German farm families insist that the government has ignored economic and familial realities. The government’s offers “always low-ball us,” complained farmer Wilmer Erfling, whose wife Josie’s family has tilled the Missouri River flood plains since the 1860s.

Ancestral Ties to Lands

Government appraisers rarely offer more than $700 an acre, claiming the bottom lands have been damaged by three years of flooding. Bottoms farmers counter that they would be financially ruined if they sold for less than $1,800 an acre--”a magic figure that somehow every flood-plains farmer in the Midwest always seems to arrive at,” scoffs Scott Faber, executive director of American Rivers, a pro-conservation group.

Deep in the flood swamps, in the sand-choked fields along the Missouri, farmers such as the Erflings say there is no right price. They will not part with land they played on as children and till every summer. The Erflings can reel off the names of every holler and swale--Bauer’s Rocky Patch, named for a man who once shot a wild turkey there; Jordan’s Holler, named for a farmer named Jordan who lived more than 60 years ago; the Flat Rock, exactly that.

In a county of farmers so attached to their land, those few who even think aloud about selling off their bottom lands to “the greenies,” as some locals call conservation officials, are told in no uncertain terms that it would not be a prudent thing to do.

“Anybody dumb enough to sell will be blackballed in this community,” said Tom Engemann, whose family works the bottoms near the Erfling holdings. “They might as well just pack up and move to another county.”

These are tough words in a summer that has seen the area’s dirt levee fail just as it did in 1993, allowing the Missouri’s murky spillage to roll over much of the bottoms farmers’ prized land. As of last week, about 500 of the Erfling family’s 1,000 bottom-lands acres were still under water--this, more than two months since the most serious Missouri River flooding had abated.

Unrequited Empathy

In Rhineland, the farmers’ resistance is understood and appreciated. After all, says Mayor Elsenraat, “many of our residents are farmers’ widows and widowers. A generation ago, they felt the same way.”

That sense of empathy is not returned. Neighboring farmers are glad to see the town up on the hill. Bottoms residents “never belonged there in the first place,” said Josie Erfling. “That’s farming territory, not a place for people to live. When they took care of their own problems, it was different. Now, they always need bailouts.”

But to an old-time river man such as Becker, there is one irony that the stubborn bottoms farmers fail to recognize. During the 1993 flood, levees all along the Missouri and Mississippi were manned not only by farmers, but by flood-plains residents who sandbagged in a desperate life-and-death struggle against the river.

Now, with thousands of bottom-lands residents heading for the hills, Becker wonders, will they be willing to return to bolster the levees the next time the floods come? And as bottoms towns disappear, will there be any compelling reason to stand and fight for the levees?

“Seems to me,” Becker said as the Missouri rose slowly outside his window, “that farmers are going to have to come up with some pretty powerful reasons for people to come down out of those nice safe houses up in the hills. If I were them, I’d start getting those speeches ready.”