Ste. Genevieve spared due to massive effort by thousands

P The town's fight against the Mississippi played out on television screens worldwide.

The Associated Press

STE. GENEVIEVE, Mo. -- A decade since it was nearly engulfed by the Mississippi River, this trove of antique shops, bed-and-breakfasts and 18th-century homes has a confidence as quiet and mighty as the river itself.

A new levee, many here say, can more than out-muscle the river that rose to record heights in 1993 and threatened this hilly town dating to 1735, only to be narrowly beaten back by a summer of frantic sandbagging.

Such times of dread -- even fear and panic -- are history unlikely to repeat, local sentiment now goes. The reason: the new $41 million levee -- with a state-of-the-art pump house and a few massive rubber-sealed, swinging gates -- safeguarding the nation's richest bevy of architecture from the French Colonial period.

"This town is doing better than it ever has," says Mike Hankins, owner of the bed-and-breakfast Southern Hotel, a landmark two centuries old. "People feel secure because in the back of their minds they don't have to worry about levee things."

How it happened

A lot has changed around the Midwest since the Great Flood of 1993, when massive rains swelled creeks, streams and rivers.

In March of that year, in a story on page 6B of the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, National Weather Service hydrologist Gary McDevitt warned that flood potential existed. A wet autumn and a heavy snow melt had saturated the ground in the upper drainage basin of the Mississippi River. With nothing to absorb it, the water had no place to go but into already swollen feeder creeks and streams.

Months later, flooding overtook more than 1,000 levees in nine Midwestern states.

The disaster that created a flooded zone 800 miles long and, at some points, 500 miles wide reshaped life in hundreds of communities.

About 50 people died. Damage was at least $12 billion, and the flood drove 74,000 from their homes. More than 500 counties -- including all of Iowa -- were declared disaster areas.

Des Moines, Iowa, and St. Joseph, Mo., were without drinking water after their water plants were swamped. Some towns, like Missouri's Rhineland and Illinois' Valmeyer, picked up entirely and rebuilt uphill.

At the Hardin town cemetery in western Missouri, the Missouri River's surge toppled headstones and sent hundreds of caskets and bones scattered, some left hanging on trees and fences. Human remains were found 14 miles away.

Massive change

The aftermath of the flood brought massive change. Government bought property from more than 9,000 homeowners, turning much of the land into parks and greenways -- places that can be flooded with less risk.

Nationwide since 1993, Federal Emergency Management Agency mitigation programs have moved or flood-proofed about 30,000 properties. And just within a 50-mile radius of St. Louis, the Army Corps of Engineers has built or had under construction seven levee systems, including the Ste. Genevieve one.

While confident about the hodgepodge of levees, the Corps' Dave Leak still insists everything "has to be steeped in some vigilance."

"We haven't seen the largest flood Mother Nature has to throw at us," he warns.

Caution should trump complacency or cockiness, National Weather Service meteorologist Jim Kramper says, pointing to nature's humbling unpredictability in 1993.

Fall of 1992 was unusually wet, and snow melt was heavy in the winter of 1993. Then, the rains came -- unprecedented amounts in the spring and early summer. The result was flooding and a domino-effect of levee failures. It wasn't until September 1993 that all the rivers finally were below flood stage.

"From a scientific point of view, it will happen again," Kramper says. "It could take another hundred years, and it may not be in our lifetime. But I'm confident it will happen again."

Kramper recalls that people thought the flood of 1973 was "the mother of all floods. Twenty years later, it looked like nothing."

Telling landmark

The proof is a towering roadside marker along North Main Street in Ste. Genevieve, about 60 miles south of St. Louis. The white yardstick, of sorts, notes in red the water levels of noted floods here since 1943. On April 30, 1973, the Mississippi reached a staggering 43.30 feet -- a height dwarfed by the reading up the pole: "Aug. 6, 1993, 49.67."

A stone's throw from there sits part of the old levee -- to 70-year-old Alvin Donze, a vivid reminder of a town's storied rally to save itself a decade ago.

"We never dreamed the river would get that high and that we'd keep it back," Donze says, standing triumphantly atop what's left of the earthen wall. "It's like drilling a well and getting married -- you never know what you're getting into, and you make it work no matter what happens."

Hankins remembers the bloated river being "so quiet, so deceiving it lulled you" as it continued its rise, straining the old levee.

"It was like there was an ominous undertone, like something was going to happen," he said.

For a couple of months in 1993, what happened here was played out on television screens worldwide: sandbagging townspeople shoulder to shoulder on a 9-mile-long levee with National Guard and bused-in prison inmates who, Donze recalls, were "throwing sandbags around like they were paper."

Volunteers flocked here after hearing on car radios of the river's terrorizing a town with more than 150 pre-1825 structures. Many of those helpers stayed for days, napping in their cars during breaks.

The heavy lifting had Hankins "feeling like I was becoming a gorilla; my arms were stretched like rubber bands."

"Everyone was just down, waiting for something to happen and hoping it didn't," recalled Bob Burr, publisher of the weekly Ste. Genevieve Herald, circulation 4,700.

But resolve ruled, saving all but just one-sixth of the town. The city's historic areas were spared.

Unseen casualties

No one here died in the flood, but there were casualties. A trailer court where 15 to 20 homes once stood near a ferry landing is no more. The airport -- and its single landing strip -- is gone, too.

Sandbags and sheets of plastic remain buried, unseen, in what's left of the old levee. Kids in black-and-white school uniforms scurry on a playground where sandbagging once went fast and furious. Just outside of town are thousands of acres of rich bottom land -- bone dry.

Many were believing what Mark Twain had penned more than a century earlier in "Life on the Mississippi:" One "cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, 'Go here, or Go there, and make it obey'; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at."

"Everyone was just down, waiting for something to happen and hoping it didn't," recalled Bob Burr, publisher of the weekly Ste. Genevieve Herald, circulation 4,700.

Roses snake up trellises outside ornate, aged homes in this community claiming to have the oldest rose garden west of the Mississippi. A locomotive rumbles past.

Not a ripple of worry.