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.

The failure of the levee was an ominous sign for the areas downriver on the Mississippi, especially the 195 miles between the Missouri River junction and where the Ohio comes in at Cairo, Ill. Below that, the Mississippi opens up dramatically. With the Ohio low this year, it has plenty of spare capacity. The area north of Cairo is lightly settled, but it includes the city of Cape Girardeau, Mo., and the historic town of Ste. Genevieve, settled by French pioneers from New Orleans in the mid-18th century. In a few weeks the 4,500 residents, and volunteers from as far as 400 miles away, barricaded the town with more than half a million sandbags. The schoolyard presented the unique spectacle of scores of children amid dozens of five-foot-high piles of sand and not playing in it. They were working: holding the bags open, filling them by the fistful and tying them off, grown-ups wielded shovels, stacked the bags on pallets and loaded them onto pickup trucks. It was virtually the only thing going on in town all week. At an empty restaurant a waitress watched Dan Rather filling a sandbag in Des Moines. "He should come down here if he wants to work," she muttered.

The people of Ste. Genevieve were engaged in one of civilization's oldest struggles, for which the rules of engagement were fixed at the Creation: water flows down slopes and collects on the flats. You oppose it with a greater weight of something compact and transportable, like sand. The army engineers have at their disposal the mighty gates of the 29 dams on the Mississippi itself and the 36 reservoirs on upstream tributaries. They have round-the-clock weather forecasts from the Weather Channel, their own weather radar and a network of remote rainfall and depth gauges throughout the watershed, linked to corps offices by satellite so a drop of rain is measured when it falls and is tracked by computer until it drops off the continent into the sea.

Opened gates:  But nature has preempted their efforts. For five weeks a high-pressure system over the eastern part of the country has been pumping warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and dumping it in thunderstorms over the upper Midwest where it meets the jet stream. The rain line "is just sagging back and forth between Interstate 70 and Interstate 80," said Bill Dieffenbach of the Missouri Conservation Department. Since spring the gates have been opened wide on the Mississippi to speed it on its way, and the reservoirs have been holding back every drop within the limits of safety, but the river has flooded nonetheless. So the corps is reduced to monitoring the slow progress of the disaster and issuing forecasts, revised daily, of where and when the river will peak. Officials in towns along the river then take these state-of-the-art computerized forecasts and use them to direct hundreds of sweating volunteers in the primitive and backbreaking labor of piling up sandbags by hand.

Everyone had nightmares last week about a levee breakthrough. Steven Meek Sr., a 42-year-old bus driver who was forced from his house in the St. Louis suburb of Lemay on July 9, dreamed twice the following week of going down the bathtub drain in a swirl. But the actual experience of the flood is more commonly one of misery than terror. "I feel about 65 right now," says Meek's wife, Jacki, 40. "I see my house on the news, and I just cry." The Mississippi doesn't sweep houses away in a rush; it fills them with mud. The residents watch the water creep up their lawns until they decide it's time to get aboard one of the National Guard trucks, or boats, and head for higher ground. The optimists among them move as much as they can to the top floor, sandbag the foundation, board up the doors with plywood, seal the boards with caulking, cap the drains on lower floors to prevent sewage from backing up into the house and start up a pump in the basement. The pessimists just move stuff to the top floor and open all the windows, on the assumption that the house will be flooded anyway and that at least will save them having to replace glass broken by floating debris. Jacki Meek had a more realistic nightmare: she dreamed about packing an endless mountain of boxes.

The flooded towns have a curiously serene air about them, the water lapping at the second-floor windows, propane tanks floating in the yards like fat, dozing pets. The underwater fields are by contrast unsettling—brown lakes in which cornstalks wave just below the surface and solitary trees grow straight from the waterline. Almost the entire hamlet of West Alton, far out on the St. Charles Peninsula, was deserted last week. Coast guard teams patrolled the streets in powerful motorboats, but with no one to rescue they were reduced to escorting camera crews and checking on abandoned pets. Coast guard policy on pet rescues is "only when in imminent danger," but it's hard to enforce with TV crews watching all the time. Petty Officer Steven Daugherty left a cat and four kittens in what he considered a safe location, but when he went back the next day he could find only one kitten. "I was about to jump in the water myself and look for them," he said; but it turned out the family had returned to the house before he did and rescued all but the one kitten, which had been biding. This narrowly averted a public-relations disaster for the coast guard; the TV station covering the saga had been flooded by outraged citizens concerned for the animals' safety.

In some ways, the Great Flood was a model disaster. Red Cross and Salvation Army shelters (some of the latter staffed by volunteers recruited from among the more conventionally homeless) kept all the victims fed and dry. There were virtually no reports of looting or vandalism of the abandoned houses, although the flood did embarrassingly call attention to the fact that a floodgate, comprising 27 aluminum panels weighing a total of more than a ton, had been stolen from hapless East St. Louis in 1990 and never replaced. From all over the country came offers of help, some more useful than others. Southern Florida, recalling the assistance it received from Iowa residents after Hurricane Andrew, sent the only thing Des Moines asked for, drinking water. Fifteen hundred miles is a long way to ship something that was available in suburbs right outside the town, but never mind. Americans appear to have come a long way in compassion since 1927, when another big flood left hundreds dead, inspiring The Atlanta Constitution to a front-page editorial congratulating its readers on having chosen to live in Atlanta instead of along the Mississippi.

Of course, they didn't have TV then. Television succeeded only too well in bringing the disaster home to people. From comments like Tom Brokaw's, who informed his viewers Wednesday night that "MidAmerica is under siege," many Americans apparently formed the notion of a wall of water washing out everything on the map between Indiana and Nebraska. The St. Louis Visitors and Convention Center was itself besieged by callers worried that Busch Stadium or Gateway Arch might be submerged. "if a 620-foot-tall structure were underwater, we'd be close to the end of the world," said the center's Frank Viverito in exasperation. Actually, that was just what a lot of people seemed to suspect; one woman caller to a popular afternoon call-in show on KMOX Radio insisted that the flood was God's signal that he didn't intend "for that river to be full of gamblers." But if so, God was punishing the wrong people; the rising waters didn't keep gamblers away from the Casino Queen anchored in East St. Louis.

Many of the pictures of flooded homes shown each night came from the same handful of towns, such as West Alton and, a little farther up the river, Grafton, Ill. Typically these were small towns which for one reason or another have little or no protection from high water. West Alton is "between the two biggest rivers in the United States," says Dyhouse of the corps. "I wouldn't want to live there." Grafton doesn't have to wait 500 years for a flood; it has had six worth counting since the last big one, in 1973, which was almost as high as last week's. Strung out two miles along the riverbank and in most places only a couple of blocks wide, Grafton would be prohibitively expensive to protect with levees; moreover, with five streams crossing it from the hills above, the town would be in as much danger from water trapped behind the levees in a flash flood as from the Mississippi itself. Citizens were for the most part dry-eyed as they went calmly about their business in bass boats last week. Some had flood insurance, others not, but most were counting on eventually receiving federal disaster aid of $11,900 per family. One savvy flood veteran, unwilling to sacrifice his garden to the river, dug his tomato plants from the ground, set them in buckets and hung the buckets from his clothesline.

As for farmers in the path of the flood, their crops were lost, in most cases for the whole year. The Mississippi generally floods in the spring, which allows farmers to replant after the fields drain and harvest a reduced crop, but you can't replant in August. The damage to crops was still well short of being reflected in food prices. The farmers themselves will mostly Survive, with the help of crop insurance and disaster relief. Ironically, the ones affected by the flood are often the biggest and most prosperous farmers in their communities, says Bill Heffernan, a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri. They farm on the floodplain because it's some of the most productive land in the world, worth as much as 20 to 40 percent more per acre than higher ground. It is precisely the periodic inundations with rich river silt that makes the land so valuable. "When farmers look at yields from bottom land, it's a risk that a lot of them are willing to take," says Charles Kruse, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau. "They farm that land with the knowledge that the river can get them."

And this year it got them, as it will again sooner or later, in a random sequence interrupted occasionally by equally ruinous droughts. A few good years will be sprinkled among them, just enough so that the farmers keep plowing and the residents of river towns can convince themselves that the view is worth the risk. Disasters of this magnitude are rare, but, as Dyhouse points out, "there's a 100-year flood somewhere in the United States every year. It's a big country." All we can do is watch the sky, heap sand on the levees and, as the flood of '93 rolls by, wish it Godspeed to the Gulf of Mexico.

ILLINOIS
Deaths: 3
People evacuated: 11,450
Property damage (est.): More than $2 billion
Crop damage (est.):  $410 million
Acres flooded: 450,000

IOWA
Deaths: 3
People evacuated: 6,000
Property damage (est.): More than $1 billion
Crop damage (est.): More than $750 million
Acres flooded: 2 million

KANSAS
Deaths: 0
People evacuated: 360 homes
Property damage (est.): $2 billion
Crop damage (est.): $500 million
Acres flooded: No data

MINNESOTA
Deaths: 3
People evacuated: 1,000
Property damage (est.): $8 million (public only)
Crop damage (est.): $400 million
Acres flooded: 2.6 million

MISSOURI
Deaths: 13
People evacuated: 15,000
Property damage (est.): $500 million to $1 billion
Crop damage (est.): Tens of millions of dollars
Acres flooded: At least 14,000

NEBRASKA
Deaths: 1
People evacuated: No data
Property damage (est.): $50 million
Crop damage (est.). $117 million
Acres flooded: 2.3 million

SOUTH DAKOTA
Deaths: 2
People evacuated: 2,000
Property damage (est.): $595 million
Crop damage (est.): $571 million
Acres flooded: 3.3 million

WISCONSIN
Deaths: 1
People evacuated: 500 to 700
Property damage (est.): $131 million
Crop damage (est.): $125 million
Acres flooded: 1.5  million

St. Paul:
The river crested here last month and cleanup has begun. Barge traffic is moving again and a downtown airport, still partially submerged, has reopened.

Des Moines: Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink: Raccoon River overtopped a levee, contaminating water supply for 30 days.

West Quincy: The Bayview Bridge, the only river crossing for a 200-mile stretch, will be out of use for up to a month. A breached levee will allow the river to flood 14,000 acres of farmland.

Kansas City: The Turkey Creek Bridge sustained irreparable damage, blocking a crucial fire station.

Hannibal: The river's height rose to 500-year levels and more. Mark Twain's birthplace was sandbagged and survived, but tourist season likely a washout.

An unusual shift in the jet stream, acting as a barrier to a cool front, has brought 150% to 200% more rain than normal to the region.

California Zephyr rail service closed between Omaha and Chicago

Soutwest Chief rail service closed between Kansas City and Chicago

As in other high floods, the Missouri breached an old levee, sending some of its flow toward the Mississippi at Portage Des Sioux. The new channel is probably temporary.