Sample Chapter
Chapter 1 - Flood
In July and August of 1993 the Great Flood of the Midwest destroyed more than ten thousand homes, killed fifty people, inundated fifteen million acres of farmland, halted barges for two months, suspended the region’s rail traffic and wreaked $15 billion worth of damage. This most significant flood ever to hit the United States was also one of the country’s greatest ever natural disasters.
This flood that twitched through the Midwest that summer originated from the two largest river systems in the United States: the Missouri and Mississippi. From June through August precipitation on the northern plains and throughout the central U.S. leaped to three times its normal volume. Regions used to nine days of rain each July felt the sudden hammer of twenty wet afternoons. By mid summer soils were saturated, leaving rainwater with no other avenue than to shoot over land.
The Missouri and Mississippi river confluence sits fifteen miles upstream of St. Louis. When floodwaters crashed past this point, sandbags failed, residents fled, and levees burst like buttons popping off a snug shirt. Passengers evacuated the Spirit of St. Louis airport; jailers unlocked cells to whisk inmates to safety. The deluge closed down a water treatment plant and swamped a sewage facility serving seventy-five thousand homes. The surge blocked four major bridges spanning into the metro area. Rising waters swept fifty propane tanks from their moorings and police, fearing an explosion, evacuated hundreds of nearby residents. Engineers drilled holes in the Gravois Bridge to prevent its uprooting by the River Des Peres.
Every second more than a million cubic feet of water roared past the Gateway Arch of St. Louis, flooding over five hundred businesses and swamping Highway 40 under six feet of water. A concert to raise funds for victims from an earlier flood had to be cancelled. Meanwhile, con artists swooped in to reap a profit from calamity. When the waters subsided in St. Louis, police spotted an industrious pair pacing near Jefferson and Gravois avenues. They toted cans and collected cash from drivers. Their cans read: Flood Releif 93 / Salvation Army. Recalling that ‘i’ comes before ‘e,’ officers arrested the sloppy imposters.
Panicked residents outside St. Louis bought water bottles by the dozen, homeowners prayed, and farmers cursed busted levees when river water dumped sand on their crops. As though to emphasize catastrophe, three tornados twirled above St. Charles during an afternoon of the deluge. In Hardin, Missouri, floodwaters plucked coffins and burial vaults from a cemetery, shoving hundreds like hockey pucks across corn and bean fields.
“They’d take off in all different directions,” one resident recalled. “Then you’d just watch them glide off into the sunset.”
At its peak, the ’93 floodwaters covered sixteen thousand square miles, more than the surface areas of lakes Ontario and Erie combined. Throughout the state of Missouri the disaster obliterated all previous flood records for stage, volume, peak discharge, duration and frequency. In Kansas City in July, the Missouri River rose more than two feet higher than its unprecedented crest of 1951.
In the flood’s aftermath the Salvation Army raised $6.5 million in aid, billionaire Ross Perot flew out to the Midwest to pledge another million dollars and the Anheuser Busch brewery shut down its St. Louis beer taps to fill six packs with fresh water for the city of St. Joseph. Already that year in the state of Missouri wet weather halted crop planting on three-quarters of a million acres. The floodwaters confiscated two million acres more. Astonished farmers sighed when they saw hundreds of their acres coated with sediment. By piling sand from inches to feet thick on sixty percent of its lower floodplain, the Missouri River ruined dozens of farms. For many, the cost to remove this petrified pollution was more than the value of land it covered, creating so significant an impact that the Soil Conservation Service labeled the flood a “geologic event.”
Close to a decade later I drove across the state of Missouri, hunting for anecdotes about how this flood stirred havoc along its sinuous trail. Rumors told how the event delivered not only devastation but elicited creative resilience from those affected. Surprisingly, I found a vast difference between my expectations and reality.
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Book cover from Rivers of Change.
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About the Travelogue Rivers of Change
The Lewis and Clark Expedition was written on rivers. Moving west of the Mississippi, the expedition traveled along the Missouri, Snake, Yellowstone, Columbia and other smaller rivers during its 1804 - 1806 transcontinental exploration.
When this "Corps of Discovery" struck out on its voyage close to 200 years ago, these various rivers raged -- bubbling with silt, flooding after storms, and hauling debris as big as tree trunks down their paths. Although these same rivers still define massive watersheds and a huge tract of the North American landscape, they no longer run free and wild.
Rivers of Change explores how Western rivers traveled on by the Lewis and Clark expedition changed during two centuries since their voyage. Many changes were born from an attitude (no longer prevalent) that controlling nature was humans' right and duty. This attitude led to the construction of massive dams and the creation of 'engineered' rivers.
How did these changes impact people and their attitudes? Rivers of Change lets conversations, research and odd historical tales tell the story.
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Columbia River originates in the British Columbia highlands
Author Photo
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To succeed in their mission, Lewis and Clark solicited local information and worked in concert with environments they moved through. It's time to relearn those lessons if we want to preserve the health of this country's rivers. Rivers of Change entertains as it tells how.
At the dawn of U.S. history, the Lewis and Clark expedition transformed Western geography from an unknown myth into documented reality. It's time to celebrate the achievements of this band of explorers, and to rethink how we manage rivers - the lifeblood of our continent.
It's also time to enjoy a good book! Want to read a chapter? If you do, then click on links in the upper right portion of this page.
You can order your copy of the book Rivers of Change by clicking the Order tab. Once you have your copy you can flip open the cover and begin your own journey. Within minutes you'll move along a snaking web of colorful rivers - through the heartland and across the backbone of this country.
Enjoy!
ISBN: 0-9743416-0-6
360 Pages, b&w photos, maps, index
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Sample Chapters...
In July and August of 1993 the Great Flood of the Midwest destroyed...
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