1993 flood left deep memories

This week 10 years ago, a lot of people in Southeast Missouri were hot, damp, devastated and utterly miserable.

What a contrast to recent days, when an unseasonably cool August has invigorated many of us to get involved in extra outdoor activity.

On Aug. 8, 1993, the Mississippi River reached its record crest in Cape Girardeau of 48 feet. That doesn't mean 48 feet from the bottom of the river or from anything else, because the flood stages are arbitrary numbers that were set decades ago, but those double digits mean everything to Cape Girardeau residents. They watch the river stage figures creep up past that 32-foot flood stage mark time and again and wonder where it will stop.

It's a sense of fear instilled a decade ago from endless sandbagging and the loss of homes and possessions.

Volunteers kept 24-hour vigils on their sandbag wall, ready to plug the slightest breach. The Red Cross, churches, National Guardsmen, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and public works departments worked hour after hour, day after day, in the energy-sapping heat. They had been doing the same thing for weeks as the Mississippi River crept higher and higher.

It wasn't over when the waters started to drop. It took weeks for the river to leave homes and streets, allowing people to get around by car instead of boat and to see just what they had lost. Post-flood pictures are shocking. They show filthy, moldy homes with belongings scattered about. Mississippi River mud covered everything. And the pictures can't capture the smell of stagnation and damp.

Damage in Cape Girardeau alone reached millions of dollars -- the city, with the help of state and federal dollars, eventually purchased and tore down 100 homes in the floodplain for $2.7 million.

But in talking to the people who lived through the disaster, one learns that the end result wasn't all ruin.

"It wasn't going to beat us," remembers Laverne Smith, who has a crippled finger to this day from all the sandbags she tied so many years ago.

Downtown merchant Kent Zickfield learned a new appreciation for the floodwall that protected his business and so many others. "We all say thank you to that wall every day," he said.

But Jim Grebing probably summed it up best. A spokesman for the Missouri Department of Economic Development, he covered the flood for the Southeast Missourian back in those days. He saw the devastation -- and the triumph -- week after week. And he learned that lots of the workers fighting back the Mississippi weren't from Missouri and didn't even know a Missourian before coming here to volunteer.

"People came together and fought to help their neighbors out," Grebing said. "The term 'neighbor' became pretty broad that summer."