RIVER CITY JOURNAL: I'M TRYING TO REMEMBER HOW MANY CUBITS ARE IN AN ARK

Watching the Broadway River gushing toward the cataract that formed Thursday morning on Presbyterian Church Hill, I couldn't help feeling a little uneasy.

I remembered all the detours and one-way streets we endured for months -- and months and months -- while workers separated sewer lines so stuff from our toilets would go to the sewage-treatment plant and rainwater would go to the river.

We were told, in an effort to salve our impatience, that it would all be worthwhile, because we would no longer have flooded streets.

Or maybe we just assumed that.

After all, spending millions and millions of dollars on work that is buried -- out of sight, under our streets -- tends to give us the perhaps false notion that our never-ending contest with raindrops -- raindrops, by the way, that obviously prefer to gather at heavily traveled intersections -- would be over.

Wrong.

And then there is the World's Longest Concrete Ditch, which cost more than Publisher's Clearinghouse ever thought about giving away.

Without it, we were told after God put Noah in charge of the rain spigot, we would have had Really Serious Flooding.

The flood-control project, which has cost more than $40 million -- and still counting -- indeed saved us from major flooding, particularly in the commercially developed areas along Kingshighway.

That's the good news.

The not-so-good news is that intersections far removed from the LaCroix Creek and Walker Creek drainage areas were deep enough to stall cars, and streets like Broadway turned into whitewater rafting venues.

Why?

First of all, if we learned anything from the World's Smallest Roundabout and Ring of Weeds, it's this: Don't blame the city.

But when you're in the middle of one of River City's finest intersections and all you can see in any direction is duck habitat, you've got to say to yourself: There's something wrong with this picture.

Fortunately, flash floods are over in -- well, a flash. Within minutes after the heaviest of Thursday morning's rain, motorists could be seen driving hither and yon checking on the Flood of 2001 but finding very little high water.

During the most intense part of the storm, when the mid-morning rain was punctuated by lightning and thunder, the police monitors in the newsroom came alive. Over the course of a couple of hours, dispatchers provided a non-stop litany of stranded vehicles, marooned motorists, flooded basements, streets that needed barricades and submerged cars -- possibly occupied.

It was high drama, and the city's emergency crews rose to the occasion.

All that rain reminded me: I'm not a big fan of floods.

I've lived in a couple of houses whose basements were prone to filling up with water. So I understand the overwhelming sense of helplessness and frustration too many Cape Girardeau homeowners have today.

I've seen the aftermath of filthy floodwaters.

I don't like floods.

I also remember how much I looked forward, as a youngster, to those rare gully-washers on Kelo Valley in the Ozarks west of here. The only time the creek through our farm had water in it was after a really heavy downpour, which meant the creek ran maybe once every two or three years.

It was exciting to watch the runoff from the wooded hills collect in the rocky creek bed at the upper end of the valley and slowly become a growing wall of gravity-driven water.

I remember how, on those rare occasions when the creek went on a rampage, the roads would be wiped out and crops in some fields would be taken on a joyride to the Gulf of Mexico.

I remember how no amount of human tinkering could keep that Kelo Valley creek from wreaking havoc.

But when I look at city intersections with their computerized stoplights and remember that under the pavement is a specially engineered creek for storm water that cost millions of dollars, and when we've spent more than $40 million on the World's Longest Concrete Creek, I wonder, simply can't help wondering, if I don't have a right to drive safely from one side of town to the other in a cloudburst.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.