In 1993, the Mississippi River swept away bridges, levees, farms and entire towns in the largest flood ever recorded in America's heartland. NOVA covers the human drama of the flood-fight to stop a river overflowing from weeks of nearly nonstop rain.
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00:00Tonight on NOVA, a river rages out of control.
00:05Along its banks, people brace for catastrophe.
00:09It just became like a monster that you couldn't catch up to, and it just kept coming.
00:13It was the biggest flood fight in U.S. history,
00:16but the battle to contain the Mississippi was doomed to failure.
00:20You know how you always figure hard work and determination will take care of everything?
00:23Well, you can't beat Mother Nature sometimes. It was a real cruel lesson to learn.
00:28The drama and the dilemma of the flood.
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01:39It is the summer of 1993.
01:55Record amounts of rainfall are drenching the upper Midwest.
02:00Farmers fear the loss of their crops as fields,
02:06already saturated from the year of wet weather, turn into lakes.
02:10But the rain keeps coming.
02:15Rivers throughout the Midwest rise dangerously high.
02:25These swollen tributaries pour into the mighty Mississippi,
02:29which begins to press against her levees.
02:34Running along the river's edge,
02:36these large earthen walls prevent the river from flooding adjoining farms and towns.
02:44But by early July, the levees are beginning to weaken.
02:58Evacuation orders are issued while there is still time to escape.
03:03Unfolding in slow motion,
03:08a flood is unlike any other natural disaster.
03:14Earthquake, boom, sudden impact.
03:17Flood, a leisurely disaster.
03:24The river's caretakers, the Army Corps of Engineers,
03:27are thrust into a state of emergency.
03:30I hear they got two to three million out there at Camp Dodge.
03:33Get rid of some of that water.
03:34Yes, sir.
03:43By mid-July, National Guard units from around the country are sent in to help
03:47in what is becoming an all-out war against nature.
03:52It just became like a monster that you couldn't catch up to.
03:59It was like trying to grab the wind.
04:01I mean, every day they changed the rules on us,
04:03and it just, we could never catch up to it.
04:05It just kept coming.
04:07By August 1st, the river appears unstoppably.
04:14Tens of thousands of residents are forced from their homes.
04:35Livestock scramble for high ground,
04:45and some people narrowly escape with their lives.
04:50Uprooting entire communities.
05:06Destroying property.
05:08Disrupting life over a nine-state area.
05:11This was the most costly flood in U.S. recorded history.
05:30It all began when a freakish weather pattern over the Midwest
05:33produced an unusually wet summer.
05:36Meteorologist Paul Douglas.
05:38To be honest, meteorologists were baffled.
05:40We were perplexed with this situation.
05:44During a typical year, the jet stream is constantly on the move.
05:47The jet stream is a high-speed river of air.
05:50The superhighway for storms is always in motion.
05:54And so you may get flooding for a week or two,
05:57but then the jet stream shifts and a drier pattern moves in.
06:00During 1993, we had a major shift in the pattern.
06:03For some strange reason,
06:05we had a giant blocking high-pressure system over the southeast.
06:08A heat pump high.
06:10And this roadblock in the atmosphere forced the jet stream
06:13to take a more or less continuous detour across the Midwest.
06:17That produced wave after wave of storms.
06:21Now this is a three-dimensional representation
06:23of what the storms looked like.
06:26Moisture flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico,
06:29converging when it reaches cool Canadian air.
06:32Consistent storms over the Midwest.
06:35Not just for a week or two, which would be typical,
06:38but for month after month after month.
06:40And this was the result.
06:41Nine states experiencing the worst flooding in history.
06:44Thirty inches of rain in a six-month period.
06:47Not only was there river flooding, there was flash flooding.
06:50Where farmers' fields turned into ponds and then lakes.
06:55Literally, meteorologists referred to Iowa as the sixth great lake
06:59for about a six-week stretch.
07:01There's no way the ground can absorb that volume of water.
07:04It had to run off into streams and rivers.
07:06And the result was the worst flooding our nation has ever seen.
07:14No one could have predicted the flood of 1993.
07:18Most years, the Mississippi flows peacefully within its banks,
07:21enticing millions of Americans to live and work along its shores.
07:25The Mississippi Valley is one of the most fertile in the world,
07:29providing food and jobs for millions.
07:34The river is also a superhighway for commerce,
07:37moving some $50 billion worth of industrial and agricultural goods
07:42through the nation's heartland every year.
07:46Beginning as a modest river in northern Minnesota,
07:49the Mississippi flows nearly 2,400 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico.
07:54Along the way, it draws water from thousands of tributaries
07:58across 31 states and two Canadian provinces.
08:03Floods are nothing new for the Mississippi,
08:06which has overrun its banks countless times
08:09for tens of thousands of years.
08:13But in the early part of this century,
08:15as more people began to live along the Mississippi,
08:18these upheavals of nature turned into human tragedies.
08:23In the 1930s, on the heels of massive flooding,
08:30the federal government directed the Army Corps of Engineers
08:33to take on the task of taming the mighty Mississippi River.
08:41The engineers went to work and devised a master plan.
08:46The scale of their projects was enormous
08:49and included the construction of some of the largest civil works projects in the world.
08:58Reservoirs, dams, and thousands of miles of levees
09:02were built to control floods
09:04and to make the area safer for people to live and work.
09:07Once in place, these flood control structures projected an aura of invincibility
09:16and gave people confidence that nature was under control.
09:24Development thrived in an area that was once the exclusive domain of the river.
09:28But the Mississippi, like other rivers that flood, would not be so easily controlled.
09:39The Egyptians, in the Book of the Dead, warned us that
09:42thou shalt not hinder the waters of inundation.
09:45They recognized that in order for those bottomlands to remain fertile,
09:51that the river had to regularly interact
09:53and that there had to be this regular flooding
09:55to keep those bottomlands healthy.
10:02The Mississippi has to interact with its floodplain
10:04in order to collect the leaves and debris
10:06and other organic material that form the base of the river's food chain.
10:13Most of the time, the floodplain of the Mississippi is available to people,
10:17but every so often, whether it's this year or next year or ten years from now,
10:24the river reoccupies its floodplain.
10:27It's something we know will happen.
10:28It's not a matter of whether the river will reoccupy its floodplain, but when.
10:33In late June of 1993,
10:37the Mississippi threatened to flood a farming community outside Quincy, Illinois.
10:41Lynn and Alec House own 1,400 acres along the river.
10:48I remember when we first started,
10:51well, Alec actually first started coming down here on a daily basis
10:54the first week of July, and he'd come home one night
10:57and I was asking him, you know, how serious is this?
10:59I mean, I know that you're down there and you're shoring it up.
11:01Is that going to be enough?
11:02And he shook his head and he said,
11:04levees are going to break like guitar strings
11:07up and down the upper Mississippi river valley.
11:12At stake for landowners in the Quincy area
11:14were 110,000 acres of fertile farmland
11:18with crops ready to be harvested.
11:20This broad sloping levee called the Snye
11:25was designed to hold back a moderate flood,
11:28one that occurs on average every 50 years.
11:32But that summer, the levee made of sand and clay
11:35would face a 500-year flood.
11:39The trouble began when six inches of rain pummeled the Quincy area,
11:43causing the river to rise perilously close to the top
11:46of the 52-mile Snye levee.
11:49It was coming up at one point an inch an hour,
11:52and that's very, very fast.
11:54It's extremely fast, especially when you have
11:57so many miles of levee to protect.
12:02Within 48 hours, the river was expected to rise
12:05a full two feet above their levee.
12:14The community now faced the Herculean task
12:17of raising the levee an additional three to four feet
12:20along most of its 52-mile length.
12:29Volunteers, the National Guard, even prisoners
12:32from the local correctional facility pitched in to help.
12:35We are boot camp!
12:37We are boot camp!
12:38We are boot camp!
12:39We are boot camp!
12:40We are boot camp!
12:41We are boot camp!
12:44A flood fight isn't merely a battle of height,
12:47but a battle of time, since a waterlogged levee
12:50becomes vulnerable to collapse.
12:52As the river rises, it bears down on the walls
12:57with the force of hundreds of pounds per square foot.
13:01Inevitably, the water will find its way through any weak spot.
13:05At the base of the levee, the full weight of the water
13:08makes the pressure even greater.
13:10Water seeping through the ground below poses a threat
13:13to the entire structure.
13:17You feel that the levees are these, you know,
13:20these immortal structures,
13:22you know, that they won't fail.
13:24And you just, the thought of them failing
13:26was very far beyond my imagination.
13:32But every levee in the Quincy area did fail,
13:35except the snide.
13:37Hundreds of thousands of acres were flooded,
13:40and the river continued to rise.
13:43Historically, when a levee would break,
13:46you could go home.
13:48I mean, it was the end of the flood.
13:50But in 1993, it just didn't make any difference at all.
13:53You knew the water was coming back up.
13:55And the crest seems to be in the Quincy-Hannibal area someplace.
13:59Working around the clock,
14:00the Army Corps of Engineers tracked the river's relentless rise.
14:04Interesting hydrographs there.
14:06You want to put Quincy up, please?
14:08Quincy this morning was 30.95.
14:11What we're seeing here is effects of levee breaks.
14:16Here we hit a stage and we broke a levee,
14:19and the river dropped.
14:21As the levee district fills up,
14:22it comes up again.
14:23Another levee broke.
14:24Here a levee broke.
14:25And here we are today.
14:27It's recovering from that.
14:29The crest, historically,
14:31has always been a singular event.
14:33In 1993, we had multiple crests.
14:37You know, all of them potentially fatal to a levee district.
14:40I mean, the levee's not a perfect structure,
14:42especially when you push it up with bulldozers
14:44and you're throwing sandbags.
14:45I mean, three or four inches,
14:47all it takes is just one little depression,
14:50and you're a goner,
14:51and ultimately that's what happened.
14:52On July 25th, the levee collapsed after defying the river for nearly a month.
15:04More than 55,000 acres were inundated, wiping out the season's crop in one of the largest agricultural losses of the flood.
15:13It was very depressing because the snow had held out the longest of any of them.
15:22And you really, if we had made it one more week, I think we would have been out of the hot water.
15:27And a friend of mine called and I said,
15:29do you know where it broke?
15:30And he said, yes, it broke at the barn.
15:32And so I knew then that it had broken right on top of our farm.
15:35And I just remember, I mean, I just burst into tears.
15:38To be honest with you, it sounds funny, but I was almost a little bit relieved.
15:41I knew we were going to go through, you know, quite a ride because the river did break on our farm.
15:50But it was almost a relief at that point.
15:54It wasn't really depressing, I don't think, until the water went down and we saw the sand.
16:00You know, just nothing but sand, just for acres and acres and acres.
16:05I mean, that was tough.
16:07Nearly one million tons of sand from the broken levee were dumped on their farm.
16:14Although their home was safely located up on the bluffs, Lynn and Alec lost over 140 acres of prime farmland.
16:25And this was just the beginning.
16:29Surging south, the floodwaters were now working their way from Quincy toward the heavily populated city of St. Louis.
16:36Here, most of the city's residents felt they had little to fear.
16:45This large urban area had armed itself with the best protection money could buy.
16:51A floodwall designed for a massive flood, one that the law of averages predicted would occur only once in 500 years.
17:03But on the night of July 22nd, the city's fortress of protection began to crumble.
17:10A leak had developed on the floodwall's northern end.
17:19Overseeing emergency operations in St. Louis was the Army Corps of Engineers, Emmett Hahn.
17:26What you have to visualize here is if, in fact, this panel fails here and falls, you have 14 to 16 feet of wall of water that comes rushing through here and is going to take out everything in its way.
17:39And it's going to go from here to the north leg of the arch and inundate everything that's in its way and nothing's going to stop it.
17:46And it scared the living bejesus out of all of us because of the implications of what you could have happen if, in fact, it failed and we weren't able to hold it.
18:00Working at the base of the failing concrete panel, engineers and city workers struggled to control the leak with 100 tons of fine rock and sand.
18:13Meanwhile, in South St. Louis, a desperate battle was being played out.
18:19The river De Pere, an underprotected tributary, was filling up with excess water from the swollen Mississippi.
18:28You got enough here. You got enough here.
18:37Days earlier, several city blocks disappeared beneath the river.
18:41But now, the floodwaters were creeping toward an area where 51 propane tanks sat,
18:48each holding 30,000 gallons of the highly volatile liquid.
18:53So on the day that the river rose to just unbelievable heights, the first tank started to raise, the water started to raise the tank and broke the cable.
19:04And the inspector at the site said it sounded like a rifle shot and pretty soon it just was kept repeating itself over and over again until all of the tanks had broken all of their cables.
19:14And that's when everybody got concerned.
19:18A few of the tanks were leaking, creating the horrifying possibility that a spark could set off a fireball one mile wide over South St. Louis.
19:27We were sitting on a bomb that could go off at any time because I knew what the product was.
19:33I knew what the potential danger was.
19:35And usually with propane, it always ended in disasters.
19:38Their hope was to dissipate the leaking propane with water since it tends to hang like a fog in air.
19:49The worst danger about it is that it's heavier than air.
19:55Unlike natural gas, propane would lay along the ground and just creep along the ground in a cloud until it reached a source of ignition, at which time it would explode.
20:04250 miles away, by a freak coincidence, a propane explosion rocked Kansas City.
20:15It showed what just a few hundred gallons of liquid propane could do compared to the million and a half in St. Louis.
20:23And still, no relief when the flood was in sight.
20:27We went from the river where we had the river boats break loose.
20:31We had part of the flood wall was failing.
20:33The river was going to an unprecedented record high of 49 feet.
20:37For sure we knew that.
20:39We had the propane incidents.
20:41The Corps of Engineers was telling us we're not sure how much higher the river is going to go.
20:46All of our levees and our makeshift sandbag levees were failing all at one time.
20:52And then, all of a sudden, it was just like God decided we had enough.
21:09On Sunday morning, August 1st, an event took place 30 miles south in Columbia, Illinois, that spared St. Louis.
21:17As the river broke through the Columbia levee, it immediately relieved pressure on the propane tanks.
21:24It created such a suction on the Mississippi River, it drew the water away from St. Louis.
21:34It was unbelievable how fast the river dropped on the St. Louis side when the levee on the Illinois side broke.
21:40But in Columbia, the break was a disaster.
21:47Three generations were born and raised in this house.
21:53In less than an hour, Virgil Gumersheimer and his wife lost everything.
22:10We had just seen that we were going to lose it, so then we left.
22:19And then I went about a mile north and stood on the levee and watched things wash away.
22:27It was, really, it was so spectacular I didn't realize it was my stuff that was washing away.
22:33From St. Louis, the Mississippi had shifted its assault downstream to Columbia, Illinois, threatening other river towns further south in a domino effect.
22:45The tiny village of Valmire became the river's next casualty.
22:48These two losses, Columbia and Valmire, were a painful defeat for Dave Mueller, who had been heading up the Army Corps of Engineers flood fight here for over a month.
23:07It was like getting kicked in the gut, and, you know, it was probably the worst day of my life.
23:13I don't know how else to say it, because we, you know, you get to know the people after that long.
23:18I mean, we work night and day with them.
23:21And I don't think we ever really, and even in our faintest imagination, ever thought the levees were going to fail.
23:26We always thought we were going to beat it.
23:29You know how you always figure hard work and determination will take care of everything?
23:32Well, it's not necessarily so.
23:34You can't beat Mother Nature sometimes.
23:36It was a real cruel lesson to learn.
23:39Like I said, it probably was the worst day of my life.
23:44The river swallowed up 14,000 acres of farmland, and the rampage had just begun.
23:53Heading south, the renegade waters rushed over a pair of levees near the town of Valmire.
23:59The floodwaters were then free to spread over a 47,000-acre valley before running up against their next obstacle.
24:07A second set of levees just north of Prairie de Rocher.
24:13Designed to hold the modest flows of Rocher Creek, these levees would now have to serve a new role,
24:20protecting the town from the full force of the encroaching floodwaters from the north.
24:25People living in this unprotected valley were helpless.
24:35It was like waiting for two days to have a terrible tragedy hit you, that you knew you were going to lose your home.
24:45And the two of us was able to get back in here, even though we weren't supposed to.
24:53We were very determined to try to save more of our things.
24:56And we came out here, and you walked through your house and looked at each other, and you knew it was gone, you know, you'd lost it.
25:08And, you know, a fire is terrible, but it's over. This was like torture that didn't, wouldn't quit.
25:15All that separated Prairie de Rocher from disaster were two slender levees running along either side of Rocher Creek.
25:25But after Valmire, this line of defense could not be counted on.
25:30Once it breached up above Valmire, and I knew Valmire was going under, like I said,
25:34I went into the emergency operation basically with tears in my eyes, saying, I can't do this again.
25:40With only 48 hours before the floodwaters reached Prairie de Rocher, the Corps and local officials had to come up with a strategy to outsmart the river.
25:53Early on in the flood fight, we talked about, you know, just what if, you know, what if the levee breaks at Valmire?
26:03And, you know, what do we do down here? Do we try to hold it, or do we let it out?
26:10And the answer from the Corps was, we build levees, we don't tear them down.
26:15And, but Dave Miller was the one who said, you know, he went back to his superiors and told them that if that does break at Valmire,
26:28we have to open it and let it out. There's no other way. It's going to find its own way out and we'll have no control.
26:35The plan was to fight water with water by deliberately opening a hole in the levee along the Mississippi's main channel.
26:42This incoming water would create a back flood, a wall of water that would meet and cushion the force of the floodwaters coming from the north, reducing their impact on the levee.
26:54Even more important, the hole would allow water pouring in from the flooded valley to drain back into the Mississippi River.
27:01Well, most Corps of Engineers projects are well designed, well thought out, and might take several years to go through the design and construction.
27:10During a flood, you don't have that luxury. You have to make a lot of decisions on horseback, as it were.
27:15In the case of that Prairie Deroster decision, we found out at first light that the levee was broken up river, and we had to make a decision that day as to what to recommend.
27:26By noon, the plan went into action. Equipment was brought in to cut open a 400-foot hole in the levee.
27:36Meanwhile, the encroaching floodwaters were transforming the valley just north of Prairie Deroster into a sea.
27:49Hundreds of people flocked to Prairie Deroster to shore up its defenses.
27:58A patchwork of sandbags, clay and rock, the levee hardly seemed up to the task. But the odds did not deter the volunteers.
28:13They were reluctant to even leave because the water was rising so fast that the sandbags that they put down, they had to hold down with their foot another to grab another one because the water was going to knock it out.
28:28And they were just terribly tired. I mean, they were exhausted. And yet, I told them to go home. I mean, what's the use? They turned right around, went right back.
28:39To make matters worse, the hole being cut in the levee was too small to drain water into the Mississippi fast enough.
28:47They resorted to a dangerous last option, blowing open a second hole with dynamite.
28:54There was no more options. That was it.
28:57The only concern I think that we had about the dynamite, and this was rightfully so, not so much that our levee would liquefy, but we didn't know what the concussion would do to the delicate situation at St. Genevieve just a few miles to our south.
29:19They were fighting a battle under, you know, tremendous odds. They had rock levees around the town, just reinforced with sandbags, 20 feet high.
29:29And you just don't, you just don't hold the Mississippi River with 20 foot rock levees.
29:35St. Genevieve's makeshift levees were protecting some of the earliest French colonial architecture in the nation.
29:42Although their neighbors' homes were at stake, and a prized piece of American history, Prairie du Rocher was desperate.
29:50I really didn't expect it to survive the night, and I was, I was worn out, and it looked to me like it was hopeless.
29:57And I finally went home, and I told my wife, it'll all be full of water in the morning. I think it's gonna go.
30:04That was the first time, I think, that it ever, that I had thought that it was, it was gonna be inevitable.
30:10Well, then I heard blast about whenever the first blast went off.
30:15Nobody's had any experience blowing up levees, let's put it that way. So they were, you know, they kind of had to learn as they went too.
30:22And, but the second one did, did the job.
30:28When I got up in daylight, and I flew the levee again, and I broke ground, we still had, we still had a levee that was holding.
30:38Prairie du Rocher's levee remained intact, as did St. Genevieve's, just five miles away.
30:44The townspeople of Prairie du Rocher could hardly grasp their good fortune.
30:49I think we've been visited with a miracle. I got another explanation, lots of hard work, but in the end, it was unbelievable.
30:58You had to be here to witness it, and the feeling is marvelous.
31:03Keeping Prairie du Rocher safe was a precious victory for everyone involved.
31:10And I guess it did work. At least we saved Prairie du Rocher, which was our main goal.
31:16Like I said, it was our only win, so we had to have something.
31:22There were few victories in the long summer of 1993.
31:31At the peak of the flood, an area the size of Indiana had been inundating.
31:37Although most federally constructed levees stood up well, the majority of privately built levees succumbed.
31:46Overall, the Army Corps of Engineers viewed the 1993 flood as an engineering success.
31:53It's not surprising that most of those levees were overtopped and filled up,
31:56because they simply weren't designed for that kind of flood.
31:58All of the levees that were designed for a flood like 1993 did their job just as we expected them to do.
32:03It prevented literally billions of dollars in flood damages.
32:07The big urban levees around St. Louis, further downriver at Cape Girardeau, upriver at Hannibal.
32:14All of these structures were designed for floods greater than the 1993 flood, and they did the job they were supposed to do.
32:20But it was the less populated areas, unable to afford such costly protection, that suffered the greatest losses.
32:28Valmire was one of those communities.
32:32After being overcome by the flood, it lay underwater for nearly two months.
32:44When the floodwaters receded, residents were shocked by what they saw.
32:51The current had gutted most of their homes, leaving them uninhabitable.
32:58Due to all of the current and mud that came along with the water at the time of the flooding,
33:11we had 90% of our homes in town that were considered, by FEMA standards, substantially damaged.
33:20So we knew that because that many buildings were in that category,
33:24we would have to come up with a different solution for the people here.
33:28Like other Valmire residents, Glenn and Mary Rolfing had to make a tough decision.
33:32Stay and rebuild, or move to higher ground.
33:35I don't want to stay. No.
33:38No.
33:41I'm afraid of what is going to come again and higher this time.
33:48So we decided I don't want to live there anymore.
33:52Well, I was born in Valmire and raised in Valmire and lived there all my life.
33:59And I just wanted to stay, you know.
34:01That's about all I can say.
34:03Like I said, I loved a home down there.
34:06It was right on the lake and kind of wildlife back there.
34:10Ducks and fish, brogues, birds.
34:19I had everything just about the way I wanted it.
34:27When the river swallowed up Valmire,
34:30it nearly broke apart the community of 900.
34:33Had we allowed people to go their own directions at the time of the flood,
34:41because of the damage to their property,
34:43it would have meant the end of the community.
34:45And I, along with many of the other community leaders at that time,
34:50were not ready to see Valmire die.
34:56To keep Valmire alive, the mayor needed to find a safe haven.
35:00Fortunately, he did not need to look far.
35:07A 500-acre site became available on this bluff 300 feet above the Mississippi,
35:13and just a mile and a half away from old Valmire.
35:21To support the relocation,
35:23the mayor had to negotiate his way through a maze of 22 state and federal agencies.
35:29His ultimate success demonstrated how far the federal government was willing to go
35:35to remove people from the banks of the Mississippi.
35:46But no one can move a town overnight.
35:49Ever since the flood, many people from Valmire have been killing time in these trailer homes,
35:54enduring delays and cramped quarters.
35:56It seems like, especially when you get to be my age, I'm ready to retire.
36:09And you think, this shouldn't happen now, you know?
36:14If you're younger, things like that, you know, overcome it.
36:19Well, we will anyhow, as far as that goes.
36:21But it's just, like, three years, you know.
36:26It's just a big lapse in your life.
36:31With their new home on the bluff nearing completion, the Rolfings and many others are thankful their nightmare is coming to an end.
36:44The flood of 93 really changed the way people think about rivers like the Mississippi.
36:50There's a cost that people endure when they live in the flood plain.
36:54That's much greater than the cost of a lost crop or a lost home.
36:57It's the cost of living in fear of a river.
37:00It's the cost of being dislocated for two months.
37:03It's the cost of seeing your wedding album or your other family heirlooms being lost and swept into the Gulf of Mexico.
37:10More than 20,000 people have decided they no longer want to live with those costs.
37:20Surrendering their gutted homes to the demolition crews, they are moving to safer ground.
37:28The government has been eager to help out in order to cut down on future flood losses.
37:33Nowhere is this more needed than in St. Charles County, precariously located at the confluence of the nation's two largest rivers, the Missouri and the Mississippi.
37:53The county is notorious for filing the third highest number of repeat flood insurance claims in the country.
38:00By living here, people like Drew and Lori Richman take a gamble every time the river rises.
38:09The Richmans were devastated by the flood of 1993, but they're reluctant to move away.
38:15It's peaceful, real tranquil out here.
38:21I mean, I can sit here at my picnic table over there and listen to the squirrel's fingernails go up and down the bark of the pecan tree.
38:29I just don't want to give it up.
38:33That's it in a nutshell.
38:35Got 11 acres back over there that were sort of a boat club slash proud to be here property owners club, you know.
38:46And I want my kids to play over there like I played.
38:53I want them to swim right here.
38:56But every time they get flooded, they can claim flood insurance payments.
39:00And in some cases, disaster aid payments, both subsidized by the federal government.
39:09This costly cycle is what county officials like Miriam Anderson are trying to break, especially since federal disaster dollars are drying up.
39:18In the late 1980s and early 1990s, you just had a whole series of different disasters.
39:25You had earthquakes, you had fires, you had hurricanes.
39:28You basically had something that looked like it was going to be the second coming in general.
39:32And every single time, the federal government, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, would walk in and start handing out money.
39:39And with federal budgets being the way they are, there just isn't the money to spend anymore.
39:46And so the federal government just finally said, we've got to look at some other alternatives.
39:50We just can't keep spending money like this.
39:52Anderson tries to buy out homes like this one.
40:05Because it's more than 50% damaged, it's been condemned by the county.
40:15What we are doing, though, is forcing people to look at other options
40:19and so that they're not caught in the cycle of repetitively being flooded out, being damaged,
40:25having their personal lives just devastated, and then coming back.
40:28And in a few years, having it happen again.
40:34For those determined to stay, there is an option, though not a cheap one.
40:39For the past 16 years, Jerry Levere has been raising homes along the banks of the Mississippi.
40:52A floodplain resident himself, he's weathered many floods in his own elevated home.
40:58Everybody says, why do you live out in the flood? Why do you live out in the flood?
41:01It don't flood all the time.
41:03We just happen to have one big one that kind of just caught us with our pants down.
41:06We learn from that. The counties learn from that. The governments learn from that.
41:11Height is the only sure way to beat a rising river.
41:16So St. Charles County could turn into a community of treetop homes.
41:21Over the years, Levere has elevated 120 homes,
41:26refining his flood-proofing skills along the way.
41:30Okay, here's another one of our houses. This is a typical 28 by 64 modular home.
41:34And what we've done, we made it flood-proof, and we got it up above the flood.
41:39And we put a little clasp to it and decorated it up, and we put a nice deck with a tree that grows through it.
41:44And there's several other things you have to remember during the flood, the force of the water.
41:47So what we have to do is make sure the water's equal pressure when the water's coming up.
41:51So what we did, we come up with, instead of putting a solid wall, we put a breakaway wall.
41:56And what the breakaway wall consists of, and the current from the river being right here on the river,
42:01they have a lot more current than the normal people does.
42:03So what they can do before the flood, they can come in here and they can raise this whole wall up and hinge this up.
42:08And the water can flow through here real evenly, and there's no bunch of pressure on it.
42:12And if it gets extremely heavy, we use a single pane glass that will break away.
42:17Another thing that we really like, and that's kind of like a super structure that we designed,
42:22we put independent floating foundations.
42:25These beams look like they're just sitting on the floor, but what they do, they go down in the ground,
42:29and we have a 36-inch auger that bores the holes, and we put them deep to how the house is.
42:35They're 36, 48, 52 inches deep.
42:38And then what we do is we pour the concrete, and then we go on up here,
42:43and you can see the beam that holds the house up, and it's welded, and it's welded to the trailer house itself.
42:48And if it was a regular house, it would be metal tab bolted to the floor joists.
42:52And then we put the turnbuckles and cables.
42:54So we got a super structure, so what we do, if we have a house or a tree or a gas tank floating down the river
43:00and bouncing off this thing, it's not going to take our house.
43:03It might take our walls, which are interior, non-bearing walls,
43:06but it's not going to take the super structure that we got.
43:09So this thing will withstand one of the big floods.
43:12Low-lying St. Charles County can expect at least minor floods every two and a half to three years.
43:19But every community along the Mississippi is vulnerable.
43:24Is there anything we can do to prevent these floods?
43:28Is there anything we are doing to make them worse?
43:32In 1937, this classic government film sounded an alarm.
43:42It warned that clear cutting and agriculture were contributing to erosion,
43:48which caused rainfall to drain more rapidly off the land.
43:53For the water comes downhill, spring and fall, down from the cut-over mountains, down from the ploughed off slopes,
44:03carrying every drop of water that flows down two-thirds the continent.
44:081903, 1907, 1913.
44:17It's suggested that such heavy use of the land may have contributed to a string of floods in the early part of the century.
44:25This idea is now being studied with modern methods.
44:29Geographer Jim Knox, working in the uplands of southwestern Wisconsin,
44:34is searching for evidence that will show whether agriculture has had a measurable impact on small to moderate floods.
44:42Knox takes a core sample from unfarmed land and compares it to soil from an agricultural core to see how they differ.
44:55The agricultural field shows the effects of 165 to 170 or so years of cultivation.
45:04And this cultivation, of course, has exposed that soil to the elements.
45:09And this has stripped off at this site here about a foot of sediment.
45:15Whereas we had a very porous, high permeability kind of soil at the surface before,
45:22we now have at the surface then a rather impermeable soil.
45:27And this means that we're going to generate an awful lot of surface runoff,
45:32which contributes to flooding in the valleys downstream and contributes to soil,
45:38further soil erosion and the movement of sediment into the Mississippi River system.
45:43According to Knox, the loss of topsoil as a result of farming is causing floods to increase in frequency and magnitude.
45:51There's quite a bit of evidence that even the moderate magnitude floods have been increased.
45:56And the magnitude of increase for a relatively small rainstorm of about two and a half inches
46:03would be to increase the flood magnitude as much as five to six fold
46:08during the worst period of agricultural land use in the early part of the century.
46:13Today it's somewhat better, but it's still probably on the order of three times what it was under natural conditions.
46:20But is there a way to farm the land and still protect the precious topsoil that absorbs water and reduces flooding?
46:36Iowa State Conservationist Leroy Brown.
46:40What I have here is crop residue from the past growing season.
46:45As this residue decays, it tends to form somewhat as a sponge,
46:49and the water that falls on this land will tend to soak in and not run off.
46:55Also, that same residue protects the bare soil.
47:00When a raindrop falls on bare soil, there's somewhat of an explosion that takes place.
47:06And this explosion dislodges soil particles, making it easier for these soil particles to run off.
47:13For when you have residue on top of that, it tends to protect that bare soil.
47:19And therefore, this residue helps to reduce the amount of erosion that occurs on farmland.
47:25These techniques may help to lessen the magnitude of floods.
47:30But even the best farming practices can't turn the land near the river back into what it once was, virgin wetlands.
47:39Unlike farmland, wetlands possess a sponge-like quality which allows them to absorb excess water in times of flooding.
47:47Spurred by the 1993 disaster, the federal government stepped up its efforts to restore wetlands along the river.
47:55Louisa County, Iowa became a focal point of this program since this agricultural area has flooded 14 times in the past 60 years.
48:08For sisters Martha Hawk and Mary Boysen, the persistent upheaval of floods has punctuated their family life.
48:16I'm not sure he ever said this, but it might have been mom that said, you know, that they just got used to it and they knew that they were going to lose a crop occasionally, like maybe once out of every five years.
48:31Louisa County's history of levee failures placed a constant financial and emotional strain on Martha and Mary's father, whose struggle with the river was not something they had wanted to inherit.
48:45So after the 93 flooding, when conservation groups and the federal government offered to buy out landowners in the flood-prone sections of Louisa County, the sisters were tempted.
49:00Just with knowing that dad had fought it and fought it and fought it, and that we had even in our past, I just hated to throw the towel in and draw the line and say, it's over.
49:12But the immenseness of the entire thing, like the largeness of that whole summer, the water, you know, was over the land for weeks and weeks, it had to come to reality.
49:26It was just so big, and there was so much damage, so many breaks.
49:33The financial end of it was going to cost so much money to get the levee fixed.
49:38It was hard to ignore those facts.
49:45The buyout program offered the sisters a truce with the river, but it was still hard to accept.
49:53Yeah, Mom, during the buyout times throughout the meetings, I think one day I said, Terry, I just don't know about this.
50:02This is just, you know, against everything that I ever thought of that would be happening.
50:09And she stated, well, your dad used to say that, you know, one day that land would go back to the docks.
50:19Louisa County's 3,300 acres are now being returned to their former pre-settlement state as a wetland.
50:26The federal government has an interest in acquiring flood-prone land, not only because it reduces the costs of bailing out people who are repeatedly flooded,
50:39but also because it reduces flood heights for other farmers who live around the area that's been acquired.
50:45It also helps solve some of our environmental problems by reconnecting the Mississippi River with its floodplain.
50:51As much as we can be opportunistic and acquire land from willing sellers, we can begin to restore the Mississippi.
51:01We don't need to reclaim all of the floodplain or even most of the floodplain of the Mississippi River in order to have a biologically healthy river.
51:11The people of Louisa County reluctantly decided they could no longer face the threat of another flood like 1993.
51:19One, two, three.
51:27But others, like Lynn and Alec House, continue to live with the risks.
51:32I'm the fourth generation of my family farming in the Snigh Island drainage district.
51:37We have never had a failure. We have had threats, certainly in the past. They've never had a failure in modern history.
51:45I think that the risk is very, very acceptable, considering the fact that this is the richest farmland, certainly in, probably in North America.
51:53Certainly it's a risk. We had a failure in 1993. But is it something that is going to affect my day-to-day life? Absolutely not.
52:01Is it something that's going to affect my willingness to invest in this area? No.
52:07Land prices are higher after the flood than before.
52:11When I think of something risky, I think of maybe living in California near a fault.
52:16So while it was very popular in the news media in 1993 that, oh, you're in a floodplain, oh my goodness.
52:22I mean, this is a reoccurring problem. It's something you constantly have to fight.
52:26That's really not the case. It's certainly not the case here.
52:30Although hydrologists classified this flood as a rare 100 to 500-year event, it is entirely possible that a flood of this magnitude could occur again in our lifetime.
52:46A 100-year flood has a 1 in 100 chance of occurring. What that means is you've got a 1% chance at any given year that a flood like that could occur.
52:54So in 1993, our number came up, but we had that happen. But what that means is that we've got the same percentage.
53:011% happened in 1994, 1995, 1996, and so forth.
53:10Since 1993, about 20% of the flood's victims have retreated from the Mississippi, no longer willing to gamble with the river.
53:20Over 100 years ago, Mark Twain cautioned us about the Mississippi, warning that we cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot save a shore which it has sentenced, cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.
53:47But the lure of the Mississippi is great.
53:50But the lure of the Mississippi is great.
53:52In the devastating wake of the 1993 flood, most river dwellers have chosen to stay, despite the certainty that someday the river will return.
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