Flood of memories

On Aug. 8, 1993, more than four months after the Mississippi River began laying siege to the Midwest, the river finally began to relent.

The record 48-foot crest at Cape Girardeau came in the middle of the night, a night the exhausted LeGrand family on North Water Street lost a house they had fought all summer to save.

For many, this day 10 years ago brought feelings of relief that the long battle was beginning to end. The receding river left behind displaced families, worn out workers -- from flood victims, volunteers, the Red Cross, churches, National Guardsmen, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and public works departments -- and millions of dollars in damage. It also left those who fought the flood with a lasting appreciation for the river's power and for their community's resilience.

In this edition 10 years after the crest, the Southeast Missourian remembers Aug. 8, 1993, and the flood through the recollections of people who witnessed some of the effort that kept the damage from being even greater.

In 1993, weary flood workers in Cape Girardeau prepared for Aug. 8 by shoring up a sandbag levee around Red Star Baptist Church. They were worried about houses along South Kingshighway as well.

Volunteers keeping 24-hour vigil over their sandbag levees weren't the only ones who were tired. Pumps that had been operating day after day were beginning to fail.

As Mark Hashheider, still the city's emergency operations coordinator, said then, "... It's starting to take its toll."

The flood was so devastating up and down the river because it lasted so long, turning staunch levees into "pudding," in the words of Martha Vandivort, then deputy emergency coordinator for Cape Girardeau County.

She said the public didn't really know how soft the levees were that kept the Diversion Channel waters from inundating the towns below.

Boats became the only means of transportation in much of the city's Red Star district. On North Main Street, the city built a temporary levee designed to protect downtown in case either the north or south levees that help keep floodwater out failed. At that, then-city manager J. Ronald Fischer was concerned that the city's downtown, well protected from the river by the floodwall, could be flooded by a heavy rain because there was nowhere for the water to go.

The city would eventually buy out and tear down 100 houses in the floodplain at a cost of $2.7 million.

Dutchtown was saved from the floodwaters only through a Herculean sandbagging project conducted under a searing sun. People came from all over to help build an improbably high sandbag levee in the middle of a highway.

For some, the smell of idle muddy water is the strongest memory of the flood of 1993.

People saw news reports of levees giving way upriver and were worried the same thing would happen here. Missouri tourism suffered because people elsewhere thought the whole state was under water.

But people came to Ste. Genevieve from all over the United States. Because of its historical importance, it became the national focus of efforts to fight back the flood. Now its treasures are protected by a federal levee system.

In Cape Girardeau, the flood spawned a food pantry at Red Star Baptist Church that is still operating.

The crest eventually was computed at a record 48 feet. Flood stage at Cape Girardeau is 32 feet. The Mississippi River had been over flood stage since April.

In the end, the flood brought the community -- really much of Southeast Missouri and Southern Illinois -- together in a common mission: survival.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182