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click to enlarge COURTESY OF MISSOURI STATE ARCHIVES The Great Flood of 1993 left a large swath of St. Louis underwater.

It came down from the north. There was heavy snow melt and a wet autumn, and creeks flooded their banks. Those creeks fed into rivers that fed into the Missouri and the Mississippi and the rivers swelled and began to breach their levees in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Iowa and the Dakotas.

We watched her come, bracing for the worst but also assuring ourselves we’d already seen it. After all, there had been the great flood of ’73. That had been billed as a once in a century flood, so 20 years later we couldn’t have another one that bad. Besides, we’d made our levees even higher after that one, believing we could keep the rivers where we wanted them.

When the flood was just affecting people who lived on her floodplains, we mused that they should have known better. But the rain didn’t stop, and we realized that all around us was a network of rivers, not just the Mississippi and Missouri but the River Des Peres, the Meramec River, the creeks and cricks that we barely noticed. And they were all flooding.

Records set in ’73 were broken, and people gave a wary glance at the sky anytime the clouds started to get gray. “It was like Noah’s flood,” says Rev. Larry Rice, who helped people in devastated Cedar City Missouri.

In the end, the ’93 flood cost at least 25 Missourians their lives and $2 billion in property damage and another $2 billion in agricultural losses, according to The Flood of ’93: America’s Greatest Natural Disaster. People were stuck in FEMA trailers for months. The river crested in late July, but Second Lady Tipper Gore visited Missouri flood victims who were still displaced in November.

The cruelest cut might have been that, in September, when everyone was digging out and cleaning up, more rain came and some flooded again. Many Missourians probably agreed with Mark Twain’s assessment: “Except for the fact that the streets are quiet of kids and drays, there’s really nothing good to say about a flood.”

Looking back 30 years later, we’ve compiled not only the harrowing timeline of the flood but also a firsthand account of what happened. And what we’ve learned is that there is one thing good to say about a flood. Whether it was the hundreds of volunteers working around the clock to sandbag the levees or the Mennonites who came to help clear out water-ravaged homes or the folks handing out supplies to the displaced, we learned that when the water receded and people thought they’d lost everything, they could look around and realize they still had each other.

click to enlarge SGT. PAUL GRIFFIN/DPLA Kaskaskia, Illinois, on August, 2, 1993, after the Mississippicompletely flooded the town. Residents had tried to reinforce the levee a week prior to no avail.

A Timeline of the Great Flood of 1993

March 3

The Minneapolis National Weather Service warns that flood potential exists due to a wet autumn and heavy snow melt. The warning appears on page 6B of the Star-Tribune.

May 9, Mother’s Day

A farming community in southwest Minnesota floods after nine inches of rainfall in one day. The town is along the Redwood River, which feeds into the Minnesota River, which connects with the Mississippi River.

Tammy VanOverbeke, director of the Lyon County Emergency Management Agency, was later quoted in The Flood of 1993, Stories from a Midwestern Disaster as saying: “It was like a snowball downhill from there. I did feel for the people downriver. It was inevitable that they were going to have problems.”

Throughout June and July, the Midwest sees almost unprecedented rainfall, resulting in the wettest months since 1895 for Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois. Areas in Kansas and Missouri get 3 1/2 feet of rain from April to July, enduring 1.14 million gallons of water per acre over 17 million acres. Already cities are seeing area rivers flood.

June 28

The Coast Guard starts to close sections of the Mississippi River due to flooding. Along with the Missouri Water Patrol, coast guardsmen travel low-lying areas of St. Charles County near the Mississippi to tell residents to evacuate.

July 1

The flood claims its first victims in Missouri when a car is swept away near the Coon Branch Creek in Ray County in western Missouri. Five young people were in the car and two of them drowned: Jill May, 15, a rising high school sophomore, and Eric N. Warren, 20, an Eagle Scout.

July 3

The levee north of St. Louis in Winfield, Missouri, breaks and for people in the metro area, the flood gets real. Water pours into St. Charles. Eventually 45 percent of the suburb will be underwater.

Even scarier? The Mississippi River is now lapping at a levee for the Missouri River. People work around the clock to keep the two flooded rivers from converging. The Missouri River breaks through levees at at least 100 places in Missouri.

Plus, the areas damaged by floods in Missouri, Illinois and other Midwestern states are designated federal disaster areas.
click to enlarge ANDREA BOOHER/ FEMA PHOTO Responders survey flood damage in Alton, Illinois.

July 12

Vice President Al Gore, along with Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan and U.S. Representative Richard Gephardt (D-St. Louis), tour Grafton, Illinois, and other flooded areas near St. Louis. Senator Carol Moseley Braun (D-Illinois) and Illinois Governor Jim Edgar are also on hand as Gore remarks that the destruction is “unbelievable” and promises swift and effective aid.

Meanwhile, Dan Rather of CBS, Tom Brokaw of NBC and Peter Jennings of ABC descend on St. Louis to tell everyone what the Midwest already knew: It’s bad out here.

July 16

Around 5 a.m., there are two levee breaks eight miles north of St. Charles along the Missouri River — one a half-mile wide. As the river breaks free of its confines, it meets up with the mighty Mississippi, nearly 20 miles north of its normal confluence. “Nearly the entire area of what was once a peninsula between St. Charles and Grafton, Illinois, was under water, leaving a small island surrounded by a muddy, gravy-brown sea of flooding waters,” the Washington Post describes.

The River Des Peres can’t empty into the Mississippi, so it starts to flood. Houses along Germania Street and River Des Peres Boulevard from Gravois to Alabama avenues are under threat. The city sends out a call for volunteers to help sandbag, and several hundred answer the call. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “[A] beehive wasn’t any busier than River Des Peres Park, which became a large outdoor sandbag factory Friday. Swarms of dirty, perspiring workers attacked mounds of sand, transforming them into piles of sandbags.” The sandbags add two feet of height to the levee to protect the surrounding area.

A couple is returning from Alton Belle Casino to their home in Bellefontaine Neighbors when their car veers off the road due to flood waters. Construction workers rescue Andrew Fichter, but his wife, Geraldine, dies.
click to enlarge ANDREA BOOHER/ FEMA PHOTO People work to save cows and pigs from the floodwaters.

July 18

The River Des Peres levee fails. Dozens of homes are flooded. Two cardboard signs at the scene sum it up: “God bless you sandbaggers,” reads the first, according to the Post-Dispatch. Below it the second sign reads, “Oh well — we tried.”

The Mississippi River is 46.9 feet high. Twenty years prior, there’d been a great flood — the flood of 1973. People referred to it constantly almost as a talisman to reassure themselves they’d seen worse and survived. But they hadn’t seen worse. The Mississippi crested at 43.23 feet in ’73. After that flood, the Metropolitan Sewer District and the city increased the River Des Peres’ banks to 45 feet high. It wasn’t enough.

July 23

The worst day of the flood. Seventeen people from St. Joseph’s Home for Boys go to Cliff Cave Park to explore, and only 11 return alive. Four students — Tarrell P. Battle, 10; Melvin E. Bell, 10; Terrill A. Vincent, 12; and Emmett L. Terry, 9 — and two counselors — Darnell E. Redmond, 31; and Jennifer Metherd, 21 — drown when sinkholes in the cave fill with water during a flash flood. “It was an incident that stunned even the most callous observer,” former KTVI news anchor Don Marsh observes in The Flood of 1993, “reducing more than one journalist to tears.”

July 30

The Missouri River breaks through the Monarch Levee, which protects the Chesterfield Valley. Fifteen feet of water quickly envelops more than 280 businesses. Marsh later recalled seeing Learjets and corporate planes bobbing in the water after the flood subsumed the Spirit of St. Louis Airport.

August 1

A levee near Columbia, Illinois, breaks, and a farm owned by Virgil Gummersheimer washes away. Within a few hours, the entire town of Valmeyer, Illinois, is underwater, and Prairie du Rocher, Illinois, is threatened. A plan to save the town by blowing up one protective levee and using a diversionary levee works, though part of the town still floods.

August 2

Residents around Phillips Pipeline Company on South Broadway have to evacuate. The Mississippi, which has finally crested at just over 49 feet (19 feet above flood stage), has flooded the tank yard. Now 51 propane tanks, each full of 25,000 gallons of extremely flammable propane, are bobbing in the water, and some of them are leaking. Many call it the most dangerous moment of the flood. Divers secure the tanks, and the propane is released as gas while water is used to replace it, weighing down the tanks and mooring them again.

August 4

Travis Schultz, 20, drives his car through a temporary tent camp in south county that has been set up for flood refugees. Schultz strikes a trailer and a parked car, and both the parked car and Schultz’s own plunge into the Meramec River. Despite camp residents trying to save him, Schultz drowns, the 25th person to die in Missouri as a result of the floods.

August 12

The flood crests and starts retreating, and cleanup efforts begin as soon as the water is gone.

Bill Clinton comes to Bridgeton to sign an emergency flood aid package. Many are worried the $5.7 billion in aid won’t be enough.

The Post-Dispatch reports that convicts are working to clean up flood damage — not at the county jail in Chesterfield Valley, which itself flooded, but at Jefferson Barracks County Park.

click to enlarge ANDREA BOOHER/ FEMA PHOTO Volunteers gather supplies in Alton, Illinois.

August 29

The Post-Dispatch summarizes how nearby towns are handling flood cleanup. The paper also quotes Street Department Director James Suelmann about leaving up emergency levees for the time being, just in case we have a wet fall.

After a river crests, or reaches its highest point during a flood, it slowly recedes as it flows away. Depending on how much rain there is, the water could linger a while, but the earth and plumbing systems generally start absorbing the water. Such was the state of Missouri by mid-August before another bout of rains came to cause damage on a much smaller scale in September.

Criticism went around, and so did blame. People analyzed what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did (and didn’t do), while insurance adjusters inspected houses. In many cases, where homes had once stood there remained only wreckage: sludge and mud and critters.

The floods were over, but we were changed. We wept. We measured our losses. And then we started to rebuild.

This timeline was inspired by and drew upon the excellent recounting of the story of the floods by journalist Don Marsh in The Flood of 1993: Stories from a Midwestern Disaster.

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