Troubled Waters

It rained on July 8 in Independence, Iowa, a farm town of 6,500 about 20 miles east of Waterloo—a prodigious storm that dumped 3.23 inches on the already sodden fields of Buchanan County. Then it rained again on July 11—3.18 inches. The water ran in rivulets and streams into little Harter Creek, which drains an area of around 10 square miles, and from there to the Wapsipinicon River, which was already at flood stage by the second week of July. After another hundred or so miles, the Wapsipinicon poured through the lowlands north of Davenport to join the Mississippi, merging with water from the Maquoketa, the Turkey, the Volga and countless smaller tributaries, forming a crest that moved south at an inexorable eight miles an hour, a message straight from the heavens of disaster on its way.

Disaster struck Friday night on the west bank opposite Quincy, Ill., where a six-week-long struggle to contain the river ended with the roar of water breaking through a massive dirt levee, flooding 14,000 acres of cropland and the access road to a crucial bridge. The workers didn't realize it, but they were in a losing game. For various points along the Mississippi, the Army Corps of Engineers has calculated the probability of floods of varying heights. The smallest probability they bothered to calculate was a "500-year flood"—one so unlikely it can be expected to happen only once in five centuries. A few miles downstream from the break, at Hannibal, Mo., a 500 year flood was determined to be 30 feet, so the city built its new levee a foot higher, at 31. It was finished in April after two years of work, and when the waters rose in early July residents heaped three feet more of sandbags atop it. When the crest reached Hannibal, the river was at 32 feet.

The passing of the crest was cause for relief, but the danger was far from over; the longer the river stays high, the greater the chance it will pry open a breach somewhere in the levee. Downriver, the crest approached St. Louis from the north in tandem with high water coming from the west down the Missouri—something that has never happened before since the corps began keeping records. Downtown St. Louis itself was believed impregnable behind its 52-foot flood wall, but officials were less certain about the surrounding areas, and by Saturday noticeably less sanguine than they had been earlier in the week. "For the next 10 to 14 days, we'll have stages above our all-time high pressing against saturated levees," said Gary Dyhouse, chief of the Hydrologic Engineering Section for the St. Louis district of the corps. "We don't fear anything will happen that our system can't handle. But we don't know."

All day Saturday levees were bursting in St. Charles County, which comprises a peninsula between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers just north of St. Louis. The rivers actually joined on the peninsula, although Dyhouse insists the land will come back up when the rivers recede. But the rush of water led to a hasty postmidnight evacuation Saturday of some 150 residents, mostly from mobile homes, who were added to the 8,000 or so already homeless from St. Charles County alone. When President Clinton met with the governors of seven Midwestern states in St. Louis on Saturday—his third trip to the flood region this month—the mood was somber and determined, but also tinged with his characteristic concern for everyone's emotional well-being. When disaster first strikes, he said, "folks are brave and good-humored and courageous. But then the reality of the losses sink in and grief takes over... and a lot of anger can come in the wake of that."

Frantic week: The lesson of the disaster, which is the lesson of most disasters, is to never underestimate nature. In Des Moines, city officials were told late on the night of July 10 to expect a river crest of 22 feet; a few hours later the Raccoon River bit 25, knocking the city's water-works out of commission and shutting most downtown offices. After a frantic week of work the waterworks plant was ready to begin supplying limited water on Monday—but officials warned that it will be a month before residents should drink it.

The bursting of the levees gave a new urgency to a disaster that had mostly unfolded in slow motion until late last week. The Mississippi River doesn't fill up like a gully in a thunderstorm; a fast rise is an inch an hour. But when the levee broke at West Quincy, Mo., water poured through the opening with "a roar, a raging roar like a freight train," according to Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Paul Schloesser, one of the first on the scene. Turbulent waves shot five feet high, reminding Schloesser of white water in Colorado. It was probably lucky that the break occurred not at what everyone assumed was the weak point at Durgens Creek, but about three miles away where nobody was working; this gave the workers time to run for their cars and escape to safety. A tractor-trailer driver whose rig was stuck on a nearby road saw the river coming, unhitched his load and drove off in the cab; by the next day there was no sign of the trailer. Pouring through a 100-foot break (which quickly widened to a quarter mile), the water was soon lapping against a highway seven miles away.