Photograph by Peter Newcomb
It was arguably the most destructive flood in American history, inundating nine states over the spring, summer and early fall of 1993 and washing out homes and businesses to the tune of nearly $15 billion. Fifteen years after the toughest months for St. Louis, those who witnessed the disaster's effects and dealt with its aftermath — from the Monarch Levee break in Chesterfield to a near collapse of St. Louis city's flood wall — relive those waterlogged days and nights.
The Mississippi River reached flood stage in late June and crested at 49.58 feet — a record — on August 1, but the effects of the summer deluge could be felt as far south as Crystal City and beyond.
Gary Womack (news photographer who moved from Nashville to take a job at KMOV just as the flooding got bad): Some friends in Nashville asked me, "Hey, you're going up to St. Louis. What do you think about that?" And I said, "It's a great opportunity, but I'm going to miss the lake near my house." But when I arrived in St. Louis, the whole town was a lake. In 25 years of being in this business, I've never covered a story that affected that many people. It was an event.
Gary Lusk (helicopter pilot for Cahokia, Ill.–based Helicopters, Inc., which flew several news crews during the flood): CNN was always showing stuff that we filmed. Actually, when I was flying Dan Rather, he did his 6 o'clock newscast from the helicopter. I took him back and landed after the newscast was over one night, and I had a phone call from my dad in Virginia. He said, "I saw you on television." So it's going out nationwide, and you realize that you're doing a shot for the national news.
Ron Anderson (Coast Guard Auxiliarist with the 17th Division): Just being out there and seeing roofs peeking above the surface of the water was difficult. You were pretty sure that whatever was attached to that roof was not going to be salvaged.
Larry Conners (news anchor for KMOV): We rode around the affected areas in a boat, and we'd stop from time to time and talk to some of those who were there. Some would say, "We're OK," but it was kind of this false bravado, like whistling past a cemetery, because they're really not OK. You could see it in family relatives. Maybe you'll have one standing there saying they're OK, but there'd be another behind them with these eyes that speak fear.
Womack: I left my job in Nashville on Friday afternoon, drove down here on Saturday, got my gear together, and Sunday morning we were in a church service in Crystal City. There was a Baptist church down there that was surrounded by water, and some people were actually boating into service that morning.
Debbie Johns (then Crystal City's local contact with FEMA): We have a main intersection in town, Truman Boulevard and Bailey Road, and that's where all the businesses are. It got to the point where the stoplights at that intersection were covered with water. The main district of town that went under first was residential, and that was hard to watch. People were having to move out of their homes, and since then, those homes have been bought out, and that's where our levee was later constructed.
Lusk: Luckily, there weren't a whole lot of people that we had to rescue. A lot of animals got caught, but not people so much.
Dave Forrest (Coast Guard Auxiliarist with the 17th Division): We were sent out one time to transfer an animal-rescue group, and one of the places we were going to was a woman's house where she had left a bag of cat food and her cat on the third floor, with the patio door open but the screen door closed. When we got there, the first two stories were completely underwater, and you could tell that the water was about 8 inches deep on the third floor. We came up to the little balcony, and one of the animal people went in, came back out and said, "The cat's not there." I said, "Well, the door was closed, so there's no way the cat could have got out. It has to be in there." So he went back in, and then he came back out with the cat, which was alive. It had actually got through the drywall and was in the wall.
Womack: One of the low points was watching this old farmhouse, I think over in Illinois. A levee broke, and it just came by and completely wiped out the house.
Conners: It looked like a dollhouse just suddenly being washed across a bathtub, but it was a real home, and it had so many memories inside it, things the owners could never get out. We just happened to be talking to the family and have a camera on the house as it happened. And listening to these people on the phone, you could hear them searching inside for how to continue, knowing that their history had been wiped out.
Womack: But you know, there was a great image that we used — I wish I had shot it — of a guy's house that was completely surrounded by water. Apparently they had tried to sandbag but had lost the battle. Well, apparently he put a whole bunch of sandbags in his boat and then went up to the house. It was literally just a small leap to the roof, and then on the roof, he took the sandbags and he wrote out — there was a popular saying then that was on T-shirts — "No Fear."
The flood's agonizingly slow advance swept all kinds of debris south to St. Louis, but it also brought an outpouring of support from those who wanted to help in any way they could.
Frank Finnegan (executive director of the St. Louis Area Food Bank): When the flood hit, there was so much product coming in from around the country, from individuals and churches and other groups, we had to open a second warehouse just for disaster relief, and we operated it with mostly volunteers.
Debbie Johns: We had an open kitchen over at the firehouse. We had all of the little old ladies in town help cook all of the food over there. All the National Guard used to come up and eat there rather than eat the sack lunches that people were taking to them from the Red Cross. You know, the Guards thought they were getting stuck with a crappy detail, but they came down and had some of the best food of their life.
We had a Wal-Mart Supercenter open up in May of '93, and by the time all was said and done, the entire Wal-Mart was surrounded by water, so they had to shut down. They cleaned out all of their freezers, and they donated anything that they knew they couldn't keep for any extended period of time in their facility, so that's where we got all of our provisions at the firehouse. Nowadays, you have to worry about the liability of "OK, if you pass this on to somebody else and they get sick ..." But back then, it was just "Thank God we had somebody contributing that."
Gary Womack: You always hear about Southern hospitality, but with this, the outpouring of help — you had people coming from a hundred miles away, and they spent days here. They brought tents. They were like, "Whatever you need." They just kind of swooped down on the community.
Todd Waelterman (then an employee in the City of St. Louis' Streets Department): One night I was down along the River Des Peres sandbagging. It was getting late — it was like 8 or 9 at night — and the younger volunteers were leaving. I had this feeling that we were going to lose the levee, that we weren't going to be able to build up these sandbags high enough to keep the water out. Then, believe it or not, when the taverns closed, 12:30 or 1:00 in the morning, we had flocks of people show up. People in buses, and they came down, and we sandbagged hard until about 3:30 in the morning.
While towns on the Mississippi had been underwater for weeks, Chesterfield managed to stay dry — until the Monarch Levee gave way on July 30.
Ray Johnson (chief of the Chesterfield Police Department): I believe it was about 10:20 that Friday evening. For some reason, that night I was sitting at home, and I told my wife, "I just feel like I need to go down to the levee and check on things." I got about three blocks from my house when she called me on the cellphone and said, "The department just called. The levee broke."
Joan Schmelig (president of the Chesterfield Chamber of Commerce): On the Sunday before the levee broke, I called the chairman of our chamber of commerce, and I said, "In all the years that I've lived out here, I've never seen the water that high, and I think we ought to notify the businesses, just in case something happens."
So we distributed these fliers around the area, asking them to fax back their name and street address and phone number in case we needed to notify them. And then the next morning, I went into the office, and the faxes were rolling out on the floor. Later on that week I got a call from city hall — it was probably 3 or 4 in the morning — and they said, "Well, the river came up 3 feet over night, so we're going to do a voluntary evacuation. Do you have any names?" And I said, "Oh yeah, we've got lots of names."
Dick Hrabko (then director of aviation at Spirit of St. Louis Airport): We had 720 aircraft on the field the day the levee broke; there were a couple hundred from other airports that had already been flooded. We evacuated all but about 15 aircraft. They were actually still taking off after the levee broke. The water was coming up on the west end of the main runway, and there were airplanes taking off to the east, away from the water, up to the last minute.
Gary Lusk: Allen Barklage was flying Channel 5, and I was flying Channel 2's helicopter. It was actually nighttime, we were on our way home. Our boss was having us fly our helicopters home and park them in our back yards because we were flying so much, and that way we could get a little more rest. So we were flying down along Highway 40, down by Chesterfield, and we just both happened to look down, and we saw the levee break. We saw the water come rushing through the hole. We both looked out and said, "Do you see what I see?"
Hrabko: I got a call on the police radio that the levee had broke and there was a 5-foot wall of water heading toward me at the airport. My biggest concern was the 50 volunteers that were up there working on the levee. Fortunately, it broke about 1,000 feet south of where they were working, and that was a godsend, because if it had broke where they were, we would have lost some lives.
Johnson: I think they estimated the break to be 130 yards in length, and that allowed the water to just gush in. It was a sinking feeling. While we were all aware of the potential, I think myself and most everyone else around here, we were still in somewhat of a state of denial.
Lusk: We turned around and went back to pick up the stations' camera guys and we came out, and Allen went down and turned on his landing light so my guys could get shots of it, and then I went down and hovered with the landing light on so his people could get shots of the levee as it broke and flooded Chesterfield Valley.
Larry Conners: We knew that night, as we shot pictures from the helicopter, that come sunrise, it was going to be devastating.
Hrabko: By this point, our county police helicopter was airborne, and he was giving me blow-by-blows. He'd say, "OK, the water is 300 yards away." Then a couple seconds later, "The water's 200 yards away." When he said, "The water's 100 yards away," I could smell it. And then within just a matter of seconds, you could see this black ooze coming up.
Johnson: When I came in that night, I stayed in. None of us went home. But the thing that I remember the most was when daylight came. I went over to the Chesterfield Parkway overpass, right here where our new city hall was, and I stood there and looked out over that land, and it was just a lake, just a sheer lake.
Schmelig: My husband and I were sandbagging at one of our chamber member's places the next day when we decided to walk down to Petropolis, which is the animal-care facility and veterinary center. There were all these little crates with the animals in them, and they were barking and whining. And it just kind of grabbed me. I know that sounds silly, but I was just thinking, "Oh my gosh, I wonder what all of the owners are thinking right now ..."
Johnson: That was chaotic. We spent a lot of time trying to get all of those animals out without losing any, which we did.
The most stressful part was the next morning, keeping people from trying to enter the flooded area. All they knew was that they wanted to get in there and salvage what they could. Some people made their way in through some fields and so forth. We had one gentleman who somehow got by us that night, before daylight on Saturday, and he was hanging on to a sign along Chesterfield Airport Road and had to be rescued with a Missouri State Highway Patrol helicopter.
Ron Anderson: I was patrolling near the Spirit of St. Louis Airport one day after it was underwater, and I was going along and hit something. Later, we came back to that area — and I mean weeks later, after the water had gone down — and we found that there was a pickup truck that had been gouged by a prop. That's what I had hit.
Schmelig: Don Wiegand, the international sculptor, has a studio here in Chesterfield. That was one of the places where we went and cleaned up. We sat there on the steps, because he has some very precious glass that he uses in his artwork, and cleaned glass up with a toothbrush.
Don Wiegand: A lot of my molds were damaged, and so were some of my original pieces. When I sculpt the originals, I sculpt them in clay. And one of the ones I lost was of the Gussie Busch that's at Busch Stadium now. When the water came up, it basically washed the clay away.
I think the flood taught you to think that life is day by day. I think of it as a difficult time, but I think of it, in a strange way, warmly, because of all of the friends that came to help.
The Mississippi ultimately came within a foot of overtopping the city's flood walls, but it was the water's rarely talked-about attempt to make it under the wall that may have posed the biggest threat to downtown.
Todd Waelterman: For 40 days, I worked 12 to 16 hours a day — at a minimum. I remember getting wake-up calls at 7 in the morning from my boss: "Hey, you're not at work." "I just left there two hours ago, boss. Let me get a shower, and I'll be back."
Gary Bess (then an employee of the City of St. Louis parks department): We would start at 7 every morning with a meeting at the SEMA [State Emergency Management Agency] headquarters in the basement of Soldiers Memorial. All of the people involved in the event — National Guard, police, fire, Red Cross, all the utility companies — were there. And then the day would basically end at 10 or 11 o'clock, depending on what was going on.
Waelterman: There wasn't much else, as far as life. Fortunately, I didn't have any kids at the time. I only had a wife. It's the only time she's ever cut the grass at the house.
Bess: During the day and early evening, when volunteers were available, we would build up the flood wall at the River Des Peres. But at night, you'd be around to handle any of the reactive things. It was almost like being a fireman, standing by the firehouse, waiting for the next call to come in.
Waelterman: One night we had the flood wall get undermined up in Riverview. That was something.
Bess: This was mid-July. The water was already pretty high — it was probably 45 to 47 feet in the Mississippi. The water was very high at the flood wall, and me and Jim Suelmann [then director of St. Louis' Streets Department] had been monitoring radio calls. Most of the battle was at the River Des Peres, but an inspector was at the floodgate in Riverview, near the Chain of Rocks. He was calling the supervisor, and he said, "There's water leaking under the flood wall."
We went up there thinking that the inspector was just crying wolf. So when we got there and we saw this, we said, "This is a major problem." It looked like somebody had taken a drill and drilled holes every 12 inches along the base of the flood wall for about 100 feet. And the water is coming up out of each of these holes.
Waelterman: Any time you have flow under the wall, you have material moving, and that's the problem. That's how you get a failure: It's piping dirt and rock from underneath the wall, it'll pipe for so long, and then all of a sudden, poof, a big hole will open up and the water will run through.
Bess: At one point, we're sitting there waiting for the trucks to get there with sandbags, and we notice that this entire section of the flood wall is pushed in. It's actually leaning 3 to 4 inches farther in than the panels on either side of it. If you can imagine, this is a wall that's 50 feet tall. On the other side, there's water within 2 feet of the top — and it's the Mississippi. If this thing would have tipped in ...
Waelterman: The system would have failed, and from the Arch all the way up to Riverview would have been flooded.
Bess: So the water kept coming under the wall and eventually opened up a hole, probably 12 feet in diameter, and water starts pushing up out of this hole. Now, the water seeks the same level as the water on the other side of the wall, so this water is shooting up 10, 15, 20 feet in the air. So we're dumping trucks full of sandbags, and it's throwing them out like they're paper clips.
Waelterman: First of all, you want to close up the bigger part of the hole with big rock. And then, naturally, you still have water running through the big rock, so you have to close that up, and that's when you get straw bales and throw them over the wall to try to get the water to suck them in there to slow down the flow.
Bess: We sent a mess of trucks down to a nursery on Hampton Avenue, because they have straw there, and we took all of it.
Waelterman: Being an engineer and actually seeing this stuff — you can't read about this in books too well. This is more of the seat-of-the-pants stuff. They stabilized it, and then we actually built a rock berm to encapsulate this area in case the wall would tip over.
Bess: This was all done while the city was asleep, and they didn't even know it happened. Ain't that a bitch?
Today, Valmeyer, Ill., population 900, stands a mile and a half from its original site — a plot of land that was swallowed whole by the Mississippi in early August '93.
Dennis Knobloch (then mayor of Valmeyer): The biggest problems that we had in the times prior to the flood were trying to figure out how many firetrucks were going to be in the Fourth of July parade.
The levee gave us all a false sense of security. There was a series of floods — 1943, '44 and '47 — that hit the town, and it was that series of floods that prompted the locals to rally with their elected officials at the state and federal level to have the Corps of Engineers build a levee. So the people that had lived in the town at that time knew what it was like to have wet feet. Some of those of us who were younger didn't.
Up until the time that the levee broke, we had sandbag crews that were out working and monitoring the situation. This hot spot had developed just north of the town on the night of August 1, and I had taken this little jaunt with our county highway engineer, who was helping to coordinate all of those activities at that time. We were on the levee — he was on one end, and I was on the other — as the water began to overtop.
As the water was coming across, you didn't think far enough ahead to think, "This is a very dangerous situation that we're in right now." It was more of, "What can we do to try to stop this?" But then I guess it was at about 10 o'clock that we knew that there was nothing we could do anymore, that it was too dangerous of a situation to continue to have people coming through with the trucks of rock. So we found an individual who was out there with a large piece of earth-moving equipment, and we jumped in with him.
The utilities had wanted to shut off the power to the town as soon as the flood fight started a month earlier, but I'd said, "No, you can't do that. We want to allow these people to stay in their homes as long as they can." We wrangled for quite a while, and I finally got them to agree to that. Well, I guess it was about 2 in the morning, after the midnight breach of the levee, and the waters were coming toward the town ... Excuse me a minute. This one still grabs me. ...
The utility company representative came up to me, and he said, "Mayor, is it OK if I turn the lights out?" And I said, "Yeah." That was definitely the toughest call that I had to make. We had been beaten.
Within about four weeks of the flood, we realized that there was such an extent of damage to the homes in the community that there would not have been enough people to go back into their homes to maintain the town. So we realized that the only option was going to be to try to move the town — if we wanted to keep it together.
We had some community meetings, and we asked some residents, "If we do this, will you folks all work together and back this?" We got a majority of the residents that said they would. By the beginning of the year of '94, we were moving ahead with our plans.
I think one key to our success was that we allowed the people to plan the town. We didn't ask anybody from the state and federal government, "We want to move our town. You guys do it and call us when you're done, and we'll move into our homes." The people themselves sat down around the table, and they decided how wide the streets would be, where the school would be, how they wanted this thing to lay out. By the time we got done with the plan, we didn't have to sell it to the residents, because they had created it.
When I was toying with the idea of running in '93 for my second term, I sat down to talk with my wife. She said, "It hasn't been a big deal the last four years. If you want to run again, go ahead and run." Little did I know ...
Interviews by Matthew Halverson
