Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 26, 1993 TAG: 9307260123
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: ST. JOSEPH, MO. LENGTH: Medium
"I knew right then that we had big trouble in St. Joe," he recalled. "Nothing came out. Nothing."
Overnight, Wilcoxson, along with the 76,000 other residents of St. Joseph, had become victims of the latest of the lengthening string of disasters perpetrated on the sodden Midwest by the '93 flood.
Sometime in the darkness, the engorged Missouri River had slipped the strained levees built to protect this quiet little city, situated 50 miles upstream from Kansas City and best known as the starting point of the Pony Express. Before frantic sandbagging could stem the cresting, some of the overflow made its way into the water plant on the northern outskirts of town.
That forced an emergency shutdown, and with it emergency reliance on severely rationed water trucked in from other cities.
Not since the Des Moines water plant was inundated a couple of weeks back has there been a worse freshwater crisis in the flooding.
"I don't know how much more of this stuff we can take out here," Wilcoxson said, standing in line on Sunday morning at a shopping mall for his ration of 10 gallons.
Certainly, this weekend has been one of the worst in the six weeks of flooding.
Some of the heaviest rains to date turned the northwestern corner of Missouri and neighboring parts of Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska into a soggy bog. In the process, the Midwest flood zone was expanded to its biggest proportions so far this year.
Worse, weather forecasters continue to predict scattered downpours followed by periods of punishing heat and sun.
In the next few days, record levels are expected up and down the Missouri, not just here but in places like Kansas City and Jefferson City, the capital, as well.
Over on the Mississippi, drenching rain that fell on Iowa this weekend is sending record crests downstream toward St. Louis and points south. In that heavily populated stretch of river, the levees and floodwalls are beginning to sprout worrisome leaks that more sandbags and rocks can barely control.
Along less populated stretches of river, there were major levee failures on Sunday. One occurred 50 miles south of St. Louis near Perryville and McBride, sending flood waters over farmlands and into a few small towns. A sand boil grew into a gaping hole about 3:30 a.m., said Jack Lakenan, emergency management director for Perry County.
"A Corps of Engineers worker and his pickup truck fell into the crater made by the boil, and he escaped the truck by climbing out of the window and into the water," Lakenan said.
The break to the north occurred 10 miles south of Quincy on the Sny Island levee, which runs along the Illinois side of the river from New Canton south for 54 miles. Hundreds, and at times, thousands of volunteers had spent nearly a month strengthening that berm, which was intended to hold back the Mississippi from 110,000 acres of some of the nation's richest farmland. The authorities said 44,000 acres were now under water.
Also over the weekend, flooding caused six more deaths, bringing the total loss of lives so far to 42. And disaster officials are saying that the new flooding will probably push the flood's monetary damage past $12 billion. That would make it one of the two or three most costly natural disasters in the country's history.
"I've seen flooding and I've seen flooding," Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy lamented Sunday after a tour of flooded southern Illinois. "But this takes me to a whole new level. We have more than a disaster. We have a calamity."
The federal government, he warned, did not have pockets deep enough to provide all the aid needed to fully rehabilitate the region.
In a sense, St. Joseph lucked out when its water plant went down. Unlike Des Moines, which is still struggling with its water service, St. Joseph stopped the flooding before it could short out water purification pumps and before filthy river flotsam could contaminate the city's pipe system.
The city was also spared, at least for the moment, serious flooding in its residential areas, though a levee across the river at Elwood, Kan., gave way, forcing the pell-mell evacuation of 1,300 people.
by CNB