Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 1, 1993 TAG: 9308010109
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DRUMOND AYRES JR. THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: KANSAS CITY, MO. LENGTH: Long
At night, from 2,500 feet up, under a three-quarter moon, much of Iowa has become a new land of 1,000 lakes, its fields of corn now glistening diamonds that, come the dawn, will reveal themselves to be mostly muck and sodden agricultural ruin.
Just south of Nebraska City, in southeast Nebraska, a million dollars worth of John Deere tractors sit in a neat green row on a dealer's display lot, steering-wheel deep in Missouri River overflow, ambushed victims of an incredible 12-inch rain that fell in 48 hours about two weeks ago.
North of Quincy, Ill., the Mighty Mississippi was even able to mix oil and water, crushing a huge petroleum storage tank like a Styrofoam cup and then inundating a trailer park with a reeking black emulsion.
Near Hardin, Mo., on the Missouri, roiling flood waters have scoured a hillside cemetery, uprooting a dozen burial vaults and floating them off into a morbid tangle in a nearby tree line.
And what of the Missouri, normally no more than a half-mile wide? How far across now? Well, at least 5 or 6 miles north of St. Joseph, Mo., and 8 to 10 miles east of Kansas City.
And where it joins the Mississippi, just above St. Louis? Maybe 20 miles wide and growing, 20 miles of sundered levees, ripped road and rail and inundated homes and villages without end, all flooded to the second story and higher.
The disaster experts say this kind of flooding has thus far caused $12 billion in farm and property losses, driven 50,000 people from their homes and has directly or indirectly taken more than 40 lives.
But a three-day, 2,000-mile tour of the flood region by plane and car reveals that superlatives and statistics tell only part of the story of the nine-state disaster.
Not that the cold, hard statistics are small in scale. The flood is shaping up to be the worst ever to hit the Midwest. In fact, as the Mississippi and Missouri surge toward their highest crests ever and bear down on St. Louis in what could be the climax, there is a good possibility that this flood could turn out to be the worst ever witnessed in the whole country.
The statistics still leave more unsaid than said about the power of two rivers that, together with their tributaries, drain about a quarter of the continental United States. They come way short of catching the genuinely epic destructive force that those rivers accrue when engorged with rain that, until the skies finally began to clear last week, came down for about the biblical 40 days and nights.
That force is best grasped at places like Beverly, Mo., just north of Kansas City, where the Missouri jumped a levee a few days back and bowled over a string of rail cars loaded with coal, tipping them like giant dominoes.
It is best seen in the fatigued eyes of people like Trudy Wheeler, who one afternoon last week found herself in a makeshift Salvation Army aid center in Des Moines, rummaging through a box of donated socks in search of a pair for her 5-year-old, Corey.
"We, ah, we, ah, we got flooded out," she explained, a bit embarrassed. "I never thought the day would come when I'd be at the Salvation Army."
Likewise, the true destructive force of this year's flooding could be witnessed close up as Mary Smith left the aid center, clutching her Salvation Army handout, a fuzzy stuffed animal.
"It's called Ugly Duckling," she said. "It's for my little Joshua. He's only 3. All his stuffed animals got soaked."
At Rocheport, Mo., a little river town halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis, the best measure of the power of the rampaging Missouri was the tone and bearing of Sgt. Warren Corp a Missouri National Guardsman, as he marshaled his forces to fight the flood.
The muddy invader was coming at the village's historic houses from three sides.
The sergeant briefly spoke into his radio, then turned to the latest group of volunteers who had signed up for the fight, some college kids from nearby Columbia, Mo., and a dozen or so Amish farmers, uniformly clad in yellow straw hats, rough denim shirts and trousers held up by suspenders.
"All right, you people," he commanded as a nurse gave the last of the volunteers a tetanus shot, "let's move it on out."
The group headed off raggedly, trudging toward the part of town where a doublewide was about to go under. As they neared the encroaching water, Corp spoke again.
"All right," he called out. "I want to thank you in advance for volunteering for this hard work. Now when we get down there, just form a line, get the sandbags and go to work. And good luck!"
A tour of the disaster region reveals something else about the power of the great flood of 1993: a surprising amount of the agriculture damage, which may account for half or more of the overall damage, has been caused by rain, not by overflowing rivers.
Huge sections of the region, most notably in Iowa, have been so saturated by rainfall that field after field after field of corn and soybeans has turned a sickly yellow and fallen fatal victim to what farmers call wet feet.
From the air, the dominant color below is often more yellow than green. When Iowa glistens in the moonlight, the reflection is, often as not, a rain-saturated field rather than a river-saturated field.
Normally, the water table in much of the Midwest is 15 feet or more below the surface at this time of year. But in the summer of '93 the water table in many places is on the surface, and likely to stay there long enough to kill as surely as a summer-long drought.
by CNB