Efforts after '93 temper impact of 2002 flooding

ST. LOUIS -- Midwestern flooding in recent days could have been a lot worse, and not just because it could have rained more.

After the Flood of '93, many changes were made at great expense along the big rivers to avoid a repeat of that disaster.

Across nine states in the Midwest, local, state and federal governments bought property from more than 9,000 homeowners. Local governments turned much of the land into parks and greenways -- places that can be flooded with less risk.

In Lemay, about 10 miles south of St. Louis, 93 homeowners sold out after the Mississippi River spilled over sandbags and filled up living rooms.

One of those was Dorothy Rasp, who had lived in her Lemay home for 47 years. Now it's a park, and she's living on higher ground in Arnold. She misses her old neighborhood.

"There was a time I wanted to repair the old house," Rasp told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for a story in Sunday's editions. "We raised our four kids there. My husband died in '74. I hated seeing the neighbors scatter.

"But all that water, I don't think I'd even want my dog in there," she said. "It's from the river and sewers, from chemical plants. You don't want to live like that. Leaving was the right thing to do."

Some towns, like Rhineland in Missouri or Grafton and Valmeyer in Illinois, just picked up entirely and rebuilt uphill -- new streets, homes and city halls.

Other places, like West Alton, are just smaller than they used to be. Three mobile-home parks downhill from St. Charles are no longer there. Missouri and the federal government bought more than 25 square miles of bottomland along the Missouri River. All that open land helps keep flood crests low.

The 1993 flood also inspired big-dollar projects to hold the rivers better. Ste. Genevieve, saved in 1993 by thousands of sandbaggers and hundreds of National Guard troops with bulldozers, has a new $41 million levee. And work will begin soon on an $11 million levee for Festus and Crystal City to protect low places like Gordon's Stoplight In, guarded this time by a 4-foot-tall sandbag wall.

And downstream from St. Charles, the Corps of Engineers plans to bolster the levee running along the north bank of the Missouri to the Mississippi. That levee broke in 1993 and 1995, turning the rich bottomland between the two great rivers into a vast lake.

Those and other flood-control projects in the St. Louis area will cost $258.4 million in federal and local money.

But the most visible change in policy was the massive buyout of residential properties. Federal and local governments combined to buy 4,382 parcels in Missouri for $99 million and 1,874 parcels in Illinois for $56 million. And that's just to buy and clear the land. Many more dollars were spent moving and sheltering people.

Bob Sherman, flood-mitigation planner for the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, said the expensive preparation means that future floods can become "nonevents."

"But spending it all back then means we don't have to go do it again," he said.