Natural Disasters

Floods

Title: Flood on the KATY, no. 1 / Gannaway, SMcA, no. 1.
Date Created/Published: c1904.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-19846 (b&w film copy neg.)
Call Number: SSF - Floods--1904 [item] [P&P]
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

With two great rivers and a web of smaller waterways, floods are a way of life in Missouri. As I write this, in fact, we are under a flood advisory. There are, however, a few particular floods that stand out in history.

Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927

The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 The river front at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, on April 20, 1927 The river stage was at 40 feet
From: "The Floods of 1927 in the Mississippi Basin", Frankenfeld, H.C., 1927 Monthly Weather Review Supplement No. 29
Image ID: wea00743, NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) Collection
Photographer: Archival Photography by Steve Nicklas, NOS, NGS

The stage for the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 actually began to be set during the summer of 1926, with heavy rainfall in the upper midwest that continued through the fall and winter. The first levee broke in Cairo, Illinois on New Year's Day. By April the Mississippi had left its banks in 145 places. There was flooding in seven states. Over a million square acres was inundated, 246 people died, 700,000 were displaced and damages were estimated at more than $400 million. That's $4.9 billion in 2009 dollars. (Thanks to this website for the conversion.)

The Great Flood had a profound effect on American society, art and politics. It cast racial disparities into sharp relief. Many of the homeless were poor, black tenant farmers. The majority of the food brought in by the Red Cross was set aside for whites. 13,000 black refugees were left stranded on a levee for days without food or water because the rescue boats were only taking whites off. The National Guard forced black men to work on the levees at gunpoint. With flood waters approaching New Orleans, officials used dynamite to blow a levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana, sacrificing the poor parishes of St. Bernard and Plaquemines.

At the time, Herbert Hoover was Secretary of Commerce. His work with flood relief brought him the prominence that led to his election as president in 1928. Many historians cite his inability to keep his promises regarding disaster recovery as one of the key factors in his loss to FDR in 1932.

In the wake of the Great Flood, the massive destruction of farmland caused local plantation owners to sharply drop the wages they were willing to pay. This led to what is referred to as the Great Migration of African Americans. Displaced and with their livelihoods gone, tens of thousands of black Americans moved north in search of factory jobs. Southern culture spread across the United States, with new centers of blues and jazz appearing in Kansas City, Chicago, and New York.

The devastation wrought by the Great Flood of 1927 led directly to the Flood Control Act of 1928, which placed responsibility for building and maintaining levees along the Mississippi with the Corps of Engineers. This is what led to the building of the levees that failed during Hurricane Katrina. Recriminations over that, of course, persist.

The Great Flood was the setting for Faulkner's The Old Man and the inspiration for the song When the Levees Break. When the Levees Break was originally written by blues queen Memphis Minnie. Much later it was remade by Led Zeppelin. It appears on their fourth album.

The Kansas City Flood of 1951

The cloverleaf in North Topeka at the junction of U.S. Hwys. 24 and 75. The
recently opened Jayhawk Junior Motel was underwater up its roof. Photo
looking southeast (photo courtesy of G.L. Sardou, Topeka, Kansas)
(This photo appears on Wikipedia as a public domain photograph by the USGS. The caption above is taken from the USGS's own website, so I'm not sure the public domain conclusion is accurate. I'm going to take a chance on posting it, though, in the hopes that Ms. or Mr. Sardou will not mind.)

Unusually heavy rainfall across the Great Plains during the months of May and June, 1951, filled the Kansas and Missouri rivers to overflowing and saturated the earth to the point where the ground couldn't absorb anymore water. On July 9-13, a massive storm dumped more than sixteen inches of rain into central Kansas. The flood that resulted claimed 19 lives, drowned approximately two million acres, and caused extensive damage to the cities of Manhattan, Topeka, Lawrence and Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri.

Seventeen major bridges were washed out, some of them destroyed in spite of having been weighted with locomotives in an attempt to defy the power of the floodwaters. 45,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. Stockyards, railyards, airports and city utilities were underwater. The flood washed caskets out of the Le Roy, Kansas, cemetary, altered the course of the Missouri River, and caused TWA Airlines to relocate their Kansas City, Kansas, operations to Kansas City, Missouri, on the site of what has since become KCI. Total damages were estimated at $2.5 billion. The 2009 equivalent, adjusted for inflation, would be approximately $20.5 billion. (Thanks to this website for the conversion.)

My mother and older siblings lived in Kansas City during this flood, and the thing Mom remembered best was, after the water had receded, seeing a boxcar suspended from a telegraph pole. She also told about her first husband going to look at an almost new car that was for sale very cheap. When he came back he told her that it was a beautiful car but he'd be surprised if they ever sold it. It had been under the flood waters for a week or more with the body of a victim trapped inside. Whoever was trying to sell it had gotten it cleaned up, but they were unable to get rid of the smell.

If you are familiar with urban legends, you will recognize this as one of them -- the car with the smell of death. It's mentioned on Snopes. A folklorist tracked down one incident of such a car and talked to the man who had bought and then junked it. His conclusion that this was the real incident that began the legend, however, was later challenged when another folklorist came across an older version of the story in Europe. Personally, I think there's a very simple explanation for the proliferation of this legend. I think it's probably happened more than once.

The Record Flood of 1993

Since Europeans first came to the area that is now Missouri, there have been four massive floods on the lower Missouri River. The first occurred in 1785, when Missouri was in Spanish hands. There was a fort at St. Louis, Ste. Genevieve was a small town and there was a scattering of isolated farms. Apart from the soldiers, most of the non-native population consisted of trappers, adventurers, and missionaries. Soldiers and settlers at St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve made note of the flood and there is anecdotal evidence that it extended up the lower Missouri at least to it's confluence with the Kansas River. With no official data, it's impossible to say exactly how bad the flood of 1785 was, but according to all accounts it wasn't nearly as bad as the monster that followed.

By 1844 Missouri was not only in American hands, but was a state in its own right. That year a flood occurred that was so massive that for more than a hundred years any flood in the state was automatically compared to "the Great Flood of '44".

Flood waters in 1951 (see above) didn't reach the levels of the flood of 1844, but they did far more damage because the areas that were inundated had been so heavily developed.

And then, in the summer of 1993, nearly nonstop rainfall across the upper Midwest and Central United States set the stage for a flood that would blow all the records away.

This is a USGS display in Kansas City showing the water levels reached during the floods of 1844, 1951, and 1993. The straight line across each plaque marks the water level. The bottom plaque is for the 1951 flood. The center plaque is the Flood of 1844, and the top plaque is the Flood of 1993.

Picture from Wikipedia Commons, courtesy of an anonymous poster.

Conditions for the flood of 1993 actually began with a wet fall in 1992. Average to above-average snow accumulation, heavy spring rains, and almost daily downpours throughout June and July combined to produce the worst flooding the country has seen since government agencies began studying the weather in the mid-1800s. The Record Flood (or Great Flood) of 1993 was not limited to a single city, a single state or a single river. The entire Midwest was inundated.

Nearly 150 major rivers and tributaries were affected in nine states. Six hundred river forecast points were above flood stage at the same time. Fifty people died. Fifteen million acres of farmland were underwater and at least 75 towns were completely covered. Not all of them have been rebuilt. Ten thousand homes were destroyed and tens of thousands of people were displaced. Damages totalled an estimated $15 billion (approximately $23 billion in 2009 dollars. Thanks to this website for the conversion.)

Hundreds of levees washed out on the Mississippi and Missouri. Transportation came to a standstill. Bridges were out on the upper Mississippi from Davenport, Iowa, to St. Louis, Missouri, and on the lower Missouri from Kansas City to St. Charles. The flood halted rail traffic and barge traffic. Interstates and side roads were underwater or inaccessable.

The Flood of 1993 was remarkable for both its unprecedented scope and its duration. In some places the rivers were above flood stage for nearly 200 straight days. The Missouri River crested at Kansas City on July 27, topping the 1951 record by 2.7 feet. On August 1 the crest reached the confluence with the Mississippi at St. Louis and pushed the Mississippi to a new record crest. In all, 92 locations set new records during the Record Flood of 1993.

USGS

In researching this section, I've gotten a lot of help from the US Geological Survey websites. Here are links to some of the pages I've used:

USGS Home
The 1951 Floods in Kansas Revisited
Significant Floods in the United States During the 20th Century
The Great Flood of 1993
The Great Flood of 1993 - Photos
Natural Hazards - Floods
Kansas Big Water
Photographic Collection

Earthquakes

Bald Eagles at Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge
Haggard, David
U.S. FWS

According to Mimi Garstang, Missouri State Geologist, there is an earthquake in Missouri almost every day. These are small quakes mostly, too small to be felt by humans, though they can be measured on seismic instruments. Occasionally (one source I found said about every 18 months) there will be a slightly larger quake, large enough to crack plaster and knock things from shelves. Scientists estimate that there is about a ten percent chance of a magnitude 7 to 8 earthquake within the next ten years.

We know there is a potential for a massive quake. A series of quakes along the New Madrid fault in extreme southeastern Missouri in 1811 - 1812 destroyed the town of New Madrid, Missouri, permanently altered the course of the Mississippi River and created Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee.

The strongest of the 1811-12 quakes caused the land to rise in some places and subside in others. It created waves on the Mississippi, creating the illusion that the river was running backwards, rang church bells in Washington, D.C., and was felt as far away as New York City. Remarkably, only one casualty was reported. Of course, in those days there were very few European Americans west of the Mississippi. If there were deaths or injuries among the native population, record keepers of the time would have been unlikely to know about them and, even if they knew about them, unlikely to include them in their statistics.

If a magnitude 7 quake were to strike southeast Missouri in this day and age, it could well be devastating. Areas that were sparsely settled in 1811 are now population centers, complete with skyscrapers and stadiums and the St. Louis Arch.

The Missouri State Department of Natural Rescources has extensive information on the New Madrid Quakes of 1811 - 1812 and on the threat of future quakes along the same fault zone.

Tornadoes

A MassiveTornado
Image ID: wea00216, NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) Collection

Every year the National Weather Service records about 1,000 tornadoes in the U.S.. It's possible that as many as 1,000 more weak tornadoes go unnoticed. Tornadoes are ranked on the Fujita Scale (or F-Scale) according to how much damage they do to manmade structures. (Go here for an excellent explanation of the Fujita Scale.)

While a tornado can strike just about anywhere in the world, some places get hit more often than others. (Tornadoes touch down in Sedalia so often, that I once called my niece up there after a tornado and she told me, unconcerned, "Oh, it didn't hit here. It was three streets away.") Areas prone to a high incidence of tornadic activity, or to a high percentage of violent tornadoes, are known as "Tornado Alley". While there is a great deal of disagreement among storm chasers as to where, exactly, "Tornado Alley" is in any given year, Missouri is often included.

At this point I'd just like to say for the record that I've never personally seen a tornado, in spite of walking home through a storm in Columbia one night when eight of them touched down within two hours. I'd also like to say, for the record, that I'd just as soon keep it that way!

Mammatocumulus - often associated with tornado development
Image ID: wea00036, NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) Collection
Location: St. Joseph, Missouri
Photo Date: June 20, 1934, 7:25 P.M

The awesome power of a tornado demonstrated
A 33rpm plastic record blown into a telephone pole
Image ID: wea00226, NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) Collection

The Great Cyclone of 1896

Tornadoes rarely strike the downtown areas of large cities. This is just statistics in action. Downtowns are relatively small targets and there aren't that many major cities in the parts of the United States where tornadoes strike most often. It happens, though, and, when it does, the results can be devastating. A case in point: the St. Louis and East St. Louis Great Cyclone of 1896.

The Great Cyclone that struck on Wednesday, May 27, 1896, was part of a two-day tornado outbreak spawned by twin supercell thunderstorms which produced at least fourteen tornadoes, including five F2, five F3 and four F4 twisters. The tornado that touched down in St. Louis entered the city from the southwest and cut a mile-wide swath of destruction through the heart of the city. It destroyed rail yards, houses, factories, churches, schools and apartment buildings before crossing the river near the Eads Bridge.

The storm churned the muddy waters where the Missouri meets the Mississippi, battered docks, capsized riverboats, barges, working and pleasure craft, and wiped out four stone arches in the upper deck of the Eads Bridge before continuing across East St. Louis, a smaller but more powerful tornado. There were 137 confirmed deaths in St. Louis and another 118 in East St. Louis, for a combined official death toll of 255, making it the third deadliest tornado in United States history. In all probability, the number should be much higher. Historians suspect many victims on the river, including transients living on houseboats, washed downstream and were never recovered. Some estimate the final toll could have been as high as 400 dead.

More than 1,000 were injured. The storm did $10,000,000 in damage in 1896 dollars, (roughly $255 million in 2009 dollars. Thanks to this website for the conversion.) and the city was damaged so badly that some doubted it would be able to host the 1896 Republican Convention in June.

And did I mention that it's rare for a city center to be struck by a tornado, particularly a strong tornado? It is. But the Great Cyclone of 1896 was the third time that happened to St. Louis. It had been struck by tornadoes in 1870 (killing 9) and 1890 (killing 4). And since then tornadoes have struck downtown St. Louis three more times -- in 1904 (killing 3 and injuring 100); in 1927 (killing 79 and injuring 550); and in 1959 (killing 21 and injuring 345). This gives the city the dubious distinction of being the worst-afflicted urban area in United States tornado history.

Here is a site where you can download a PDF document with pictures, statistics and graphics from the Great Cyclone.
Here is a site with an extensive contemporary account.
A book of photographs was published containing pictures of the destruction. Many, if not all, of those photos are available from the NOAA's National Weather Service archive of historic photographs.

Jefferson and Allen Avenues. In: "Photographic Views of the Great Cyclone at St. Louis, May 27, 1896." Library Call Number M15.1 P575.
Image ID: wea00256, NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) Collection
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
Photo Date: 1896 May 27
Photographer: Photo by Strauss
Credit: Archival Photograph by Mr. Steve Nicklas, NOS, NGS

The Eads Bridge. In: "Photographic Views of the Great Cyclone at St. Louis, May 27, 1896." Library Call Number M15.1 P575.
Image ID: wea00296, NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) Collection
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
Photo Date: 1896 May 27
Photographer: Photo by Strauss
Credit: Archival Photograph by Mr. Steve Nicklas, NOS, NGS

The awesome force of a tornado - tree pierced by shovel
Tornado of May 27, 1896, at St. Louis, Missouri
In: "The New Air World", Willis Luther Moore, 1922 Figure 19, p. 146
Image ID: wea00221, NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) Collection

Tri-State Tornado of 1925

March 18, 1925. One minute past one P.M. The deadliest tornado in U.S. history touched down in southeastern Missouri, three miles north-northwest of Ellington and continued on a 219-mile long path through southern Illinois and into Indiana before finally dissipating three miles south of Petersburg at 4:30 P.M.

An F5, the strongest catagory of tornado, the Tri-State Tornado set many tragic records that day. The average tornado stays on the ground for about ten minutes. The Tri-State monster was down for three and a half hours. It travelled through three states, killing a combined total of 695 people, injuring more than 2,000 and destroying 15,000 homes. In Murphysboro, Illinois, 234 people died, a record number of deaths for a single community from a tornado. (The Great Cyclone doesn't meet this because the deaths were divided between two communities: St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis, Illinois.)

Parrish, Illinois, and Griffin, Indiana, were completely destroyed. Seventeen children died when Longfellow School in Murphysboro, Illinois, partially collapsed. In DeSoto, Illinois, the tornado killed 33 school children. That's the largest number of children to die in an American school from this type of disaster.

To be thorough, I should note that some historians believe the Tri-State Tornado was not actually one continuous tornado, but rather a close family of smaller tornadoes. Technically, a tornado is only a tornado when it is actually touching the ground. If it pulls up it becomes a funnel cloud and if it touches down again that is considered a separate tornado. Thus, the question becomes "did the Tri-State Tornado remain on the ground for its entire 219-mile track?" At this point, it's probably impossible to tell. What is known is that the tornado cut a 3/4 to 1 mile wide path of destruction across three states, it held the same heading for 183 miles of that distance and nowhere along that path was spared. Eighty-five years later the National Oceanic and Aeronautic Administration maintains a memorial website to commemorate that deadly day and to teach new generations about the awful power of the wind.

Ruins of the Longfellow School where 17 children were killed.
In: Journal of the Western Society of Engineers, Vol. 30, No. 9. September, 1925.
Image ID: wea00234, NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) Collection
Location: Murphysboro, Illinois
Photo Date: 1925 March 18

Ruins of the De Soto, Illinois, public school where 33 children were killed.
In: Journal of the Western Society of Engineers, Vol. 30, No. 9. September, 1925.
Image ID: wea00238, NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) Collection
Location: Illinois, De Soto
Photo Date: 1925 March 18