by David Kubicek
In the fall of 1993, Midwest Food Service News (MFSN), a regional monthly trade newspaper, asked me to write a series of articles about the Great Midwestern flood of 1993 which would end up causing $15 billion in property damage over eight states between April and October of that year.
I wrote several stories, most of them dealing with how the flood would affect grocery prices, food processors’ reactions to the flooding, disaster planning and other topics of interest to the food producers and retailers who made up MFSN‘s primary readership. I gathered information for most of the stories through phone interviews, but there was one story I felt could not be told from a distance. I wanted to show how the flood had affected the people who lived in its path, and to do that I had to visit a floodplain.
The Platte River flows through Nebraska and empties into the Missouri River, which runs along the Nebraska-Iowa border. Since my wife, Cheryl, grew up in Plattsmouth, a town of about 6,500 which sits near the junction of these two rivers, she introduced me to former neighbors who farmed along the Platte.
We spoke to a middle aged couple who could see the Platte River from their house. Every morning they would step out onto the porch to see how much closer the flood water had crept to their home during the night. One morning they found that the water had reached the edge of their yard, perhaps a hundred feet away, and they began thinking that the time had come for them to leave. But they delayed for another day and another day after that while the waterline hugged the edge of their yard. Finally, there came a morning when they stepped out onto their porch to see that the water had receded a few feet, and day after day they watched as the water continued to pull back until it was within the banks of the river once again. The flood, for them, was over.
After we visited with this couple, Cheryl and I walked along the river’s edge, and what we saw impressed upon us how lucky those folks had been. They, like other farmers along the river, lost some good crop land because the receding flood water had left a layer of sand in its wake. But scattered along the shore, perhaps for miles, were pieces of the lives of other families who hadn’t been so lucky–the flood water had not stopped at the edge of their yards but had crept across their lawns and invaded their homes.
As Cheryl and I trudged through the sand along the river, we saw an Easy-Bake oven half buried in the sand. A lawn chair. A doll. Various household appliances and pieces of appliances. Part of a table. Articles of clothing. A basketball. A tricycle.
This is only a sampling of the destruction we saw along the shore. These items may have come from nearby farms or they may have been swept away from homes miles upriver only to be abandoned here when the water receded.
After 25 years, I have forgotten the specifics of the other stories in my series, but this experience is still lodged vividly in my memory. After the water receded, the economy bounced back, but many of the people who were at the center of the flood still carry scars.
Author’s note: Mary C. Erickson, deputy director of the National Weather Service, told the New York Times that the 2019 flooding may end up being worse than the historic floods of 1993 and 2011, with 13 million people in 25 states facing major flooding.
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