Troubled Waters

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