A Mississippi Flood Again Wins the Fight

A natural stick-and-rudder man, Jim Goetsch quickly throttled down, worked the pedals and banked the Cessna hard, spiraling down, down, down to 600 feet above the swollen river. He tapped his thick finger against his side window, pointing.

“Looky there. My buddy’s house has water all around it--and he works for the Army Corps of Engineers. They can’t do a thing about this one.”

This one is the 2001 flooding of the Mississippi River, a slow, inexorable rising that continued unabated Thursday, swallowing dozens more homes in Wisconsin and Iowa as rain was expected upstream in Minnesota.

The National Guard was out in force in several Iowa communities, working with thousands of volunteers to bag sand and build dikes in areas expected to be hit hard as the crest of the flood moves south.

Every great river has its river rats, the old-timers who know the backwaters and the flood plains, the bass and the birds like they know the wives who abide this other love. Goetsch is a sort of flying river rat, a 59-year-old float-plane pilot who travels up and down the Mississippi almost every day, weather permitting, training other pilots to land in water. He knows the dams and locks and riverside roads by name, number and distance from the Quad City International Airport in Moline, Ill.

He can tell you, with that odd perspective acquired by those who spend their lives at high altitude, just how the Mississippi rises, falls and how it floods.

“This is the third ‘hundred-year flood’ in the last 10 years,” he said.

As Goetsch headed north from the airport, he told the tale of his first Mississippi flood, in 1952. The river swept bullhead 15 miles inland and, when it receded, left the fish swimming in a ditch near his house.

“I was just a boy, and we pulled bullhead out of there all summer long. It was great.”

He pushed the nose of plane down, banked right and there it was, the Mighty Mississippi.

A River Bleeding Across the Prairie

The river looked much different from this altitude than from ground level in nearby Davenport, Iowa, where by Thursday afternoon the water had washed through riverside parks and the main drag and was moving into downtown. By Thursday night, rain added to the trouble.

Something about the river simply seemed wrong, amiss. The river was leaking, bleeding everywhere, but had not yet ruptured entirely.

That’s how it looked as far as the eye could see--perhaps 50 miles on this slightly hazy day--how it looked upriver and downriver. It looked like all the water of the Mississippi had been funneled into a vein a bit too narrow.

Sandbag levees were certainly too thin in the community of Shore Acres, where 60 homes were under water and residents were evacuated Thursday, and too thin in East Davenport, where 75 National Guard troops were sent to bag sand.

Heading northeast, upriver, Goetsch crossed Lock and Dam No. 14. The gates were open wide, as they are at most dams on the 2,350-mile-long river.

He crossed Interstate 80. Traffic moved slowly, everyone eyeing the river, trying, it seemed, to watch it rise, which is almost possible at the current rate of a foot a day.

Goetsch banked right and swooped over a couple of “tows.” These boat-and-barge combinations are the economic lifeblood of river towns, descendants of the paddle wheelers and, before that, canoes and rafts.

The tows were tied to the treetops of a mostly submerged island, their engines idling against the current. Each tow includes 15 barges. Each barge can hold up to 2,300 tons, or 60 rail cars of wheat, coal or steel.

For 403 miles, though, from Minnesota’s Twin Cities down to Muscatine, Iowa, not a tow has moved since the flooding began a week ago. The river, swollen by melting snowpack, is closed to traffic, and about 200 vessels are sitting in the middle of the river, unable to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods.

“There’s Clinton,” Goetsch said, pointing to a town on the Iowa side, “and there’s Fulton, Ill. They both have levees. They’ll be OK. It’s the places that don’t have dikes. . . .”

After the river’s first massive flood of modern times, in 1965, many communities erected miles-long walls of riprap and concrete. From the air, they are a lovely gray-tan border for the brown river.

From ground level, though, they look like what they are: 7-foot-high piles of rock and cement. And they obscure the view of the river entirely for hundreds of thousands of residents.

They pose another problem.

“Every levee tends to back up the water for people upstream,” Goetsch said, as he banked and turned back southeast, toward Bettendorf, Iowa, which has a levee, and Davenport, which doesn’t. “So that means those people upstream have to build a higher levee. And on and on. And nature wins anyway.”

Arsenal Island, where military ordnance is manufactured, looked like it would do all right. Dynamite Island, built with rock blasted out of the river bottom, was going under.

“We’ll check the golf course and skating rink,” Goetsch said. “They’ll be under.”

Indeed they were. A man in a small boat paddled near the back nine of the Credit Island course.

After more than an hour in the air, Goetsch turned back toward the airport. But he wanted to check one more place on the way and headed toward Davenport, the industrial part down by the river. This was where he experienced his second great flood, in 1965, and the last he watched from the ground.

He pointed out a big warehouse, which once belonged to International Harvester, where he worked as a mechanic. “We sandbagged the whole thing, and the river came right through anyway. Every flood after that, they just let the water come through and hosed it down later.”

Goetsch climbed east and was quickly over businesses in Moline that will probably never flood because they are 20 or 30 feet higher than the old warehouse where he once worked.

A flood on the Mississippi doesn’t crash or cascade or even take you by surprise. Once the river tops its banks or the levees, it simply keeps spreading out across the prairie. There is no flash-flood mystery. The Mississippi simply fills up all the land, all the homes, everything that doesn’t sit higher.

Goetsch throttled down, fought a slight updraft and set the airplane gently down.

“You know, those of us who have been around a while, we don’t get too worked up about this,” he said as he taxied toward his hangar.

He shut down the engine and took off his headset.

“This one, though, it’s gonna be pretty bad.”

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Upper Mississippi Flooding

The flooded Mississippi River has already crested at some spots north and is expected to crest on the lower river in coming days. Here are some of the highest river levels:

Sources: National Weather Service; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration