Jun 18 2008
Waiting for Disaster? A Primer on Flooding
Flooding, as I learned in my first year of reporting, takes on many different shapes and sizes.
It can be harsh and immediate, like the March floods felt in southern Illinois this spring. We got 12 inches of rain about 20 hours. The land was already saturated from an overly wet winter and two major ice storms. The water rose rapidly as city storm sewers could not meet the capacity to let the water flow away. Rivers and creeks swelled out of their banks and near some reservoirs, water backed up, the creeks simply stopped emptying into the lake, because the lake was already too full.
For about three days, the rushing water stalled and it was deep, but as soon as the floodgates, both literally and figurateively, were opened to let the water flow downstream, the water abated quickly, leaving behind the smelly, silty mush that only someone who has lived through a flood can appreciate.
This was, for all intensive purposes, the very definition of a flash flood. The water came down fast and left almost as quickly.
Then, there is the type of flooding we are anticipating on the Mississippi River for the next week or more. Trained spotters and those who are familiar with the territory can see the gradual increase, the disappearance of a sand bar in the middle of the river or water lapping higher on a farm levee.
Gradual can be better. It gives people time to prepare, except when there is nothing to be done. In 1993, residents in south western Illinois sandbagged and prayed to save some communities. Valmeyer completely relocated the town to a nearby bluff after the Great Flood, but others along the riverfront stayed.
Sure some fo the land was bought out by the National Flood Insurance Plan, but the bottoms are fertile farmland and most farmers want to live close to their crops. Now, they have the agonizing wait to see if the farm levees hold and the water stays below the top of levee.
The waiting may be even more agonizing that the disaster itself. Once the flood hits, people can clean up, get to work repairing the damage done. While you wait, there isn’t much to do. Working the fields seems meaningless when they might be under water tomorrow or the next day. Beside, with seepage, ground water that literally seeps out of the river into the surrounding farmland, most of the bottoms are too wet to put a tractor in anyway.
And there is the agony of levee breaks upstream. As each town is flooded, you feel their pain and wonder if that little bit more area for the water to spread out means less stress and water trying to rip a hole in the levee that protects you. You rejoice and mourn together and wait for the water to rise.
At Chester, one of the closest points along the Mississippi to me, the river is still expected to crest about 8 feet lower than it did in 1993. But that is little comfort to the home owners in Rockwood and Cora, who will see the flood gates on Illinois Route 3 close any day now, to protect the farms behind the levee. From Cora to Chester, the road will likely soon be impassable, as will the train tracks shipping the regions farm produce to market.
The people who live in the bottoms will tell you that the river rises and falls and they can live with that. It’s just the waiting that will kill you.
