This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Aug. 1, 2013: Dennis Knobloch, then the mayor of Valmeyer, said he didn’t grasp the magnitude of the flooding that had engulfed his village in those first days of August 1993 until he and Monroe County officials surveyed the scene by helicopter.
"It was like flying over an ocean,’’ he said. "It was water from the Illinois bluff to the Missouri bluff, which is 4 miles apart here. It is hard to comprehend.’’
Residents had already been evacuated, so there were no injuries or deaths as the Mississippi River claimed the village of 900. In lower elevations, the water would eventually be 14 to 16 feet deep, totally submerging one-story buildings. Rooftops appeared to be islands in a sea of floodwater brown.
The village, was in effect, now part of the river channel.
When officials were able to survey the town by boat, they realized that the damage from this flood was unlike anything even the oldtimers in town had ever witnessed. Knobloch said it became clear very early on that a lot of residents would not be interested in rebuilding in the town.
Floodwater would remain in some parts of the waterlogged village for two months. In sections of the community where the water had been less deep, residents began mopping up as soon as the river began to recede. But a second wave of flooding in September brought the water levels back up.
"It was another punch in the stomach for the people,’’ Knobloch said. "They would go in and do some cleaning and strip down some plasterboard and rip out carpet. And then the water would come back up. It was as emotionally draining as it was a problem structurally for the buildings.’’
Knobloch said that when relocation was first suggested by a regional planner, he thought it was a crazy idea. But as damages from the disaster mounted, the idea was presented at a community meeting. After residents overwhelmingly expressed their support for moving the town, the process began in haste, driven by a specific requirement.
"They said, 'Just make sure we keep dry feet. We want to be higher and drier than we were before.’ ’’
The clock starts ticking
Nicholas Pinter, a professor of geology at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, points to Valmeyer’s move to an adjacent bluff as “one of the great success stories of the ‘93 flood.’’
"A community surveyed the damage and made a master plan to move all of the community up onto the bluffs, where they have been high and dry ever since then,’’ he said. "This is a commendation to the leadership there. They did what many other communities have not done after floods, and they’ve done it much more extensively and thoroughly as a community. This is in contrast to other towns and cities that will buy out a handful of properties -- a piecemeal solution.’’
Pinter and Knobloch agree that a major obstacle to most relocation efforts is the passage of time.
The clock starts ticking, as soon as residents are forced to flee, said the former mayor. It was a point he made to Congress at a hearing on the federal response to the disaster held that fall of 1993.
FEMA today includes Valmeyer in its case studies of “best practices” and lauds the quick acquisition of flood-damaged properties, but Knobloch told Congress at the time that the agency’s mitigation process wasn’t quick enough. He lauded FEMA’s efforts in providing emergency rental subsidies and mobile homes to Valmeyer’s 900 displaced residents, but he said the agency’s responses were "unsatisfactory” when it came to the relocation process.
"According to historical data, a relocation effort such as this was predicted to take five to 10 years. By that time, our residents would be dispersed like dandelion seeds in the wind,’’ Knobloch said in his testimony.
He explained that his village had already taken matters into its own hands and formed committees of residents to tackle the logistics of building a new town. A regional planning commission advised the committees that began meeting weekly in early October, just eight weeks after the flood. The groups were charged with delivering proposals for a town plan to be presented in November; lot sales would start in December.
Knobloch told Congress that he sympathized with the hundreds of small communities waiting for guidance from the government.
Pinter said that delays in the FEMA buyout program continue even today and prevent many communities from moving forward quickly enough after a disaster.
"You can give a community all the help in the world and just about the fastest this can ever take place under the current system is two years,’’ he said.
Faculty and researchers from SIU-Carbondale are currently advising residents of Olive Branch, Ill., in their efforts to relocate, using flood mitigation funds from FEMA. The tiny unincorporated community in Alexander County, about 50 miles from Carbondale, was devastated by Mississippi River flooding in 2011.
Residents of Olive Branch have also met with Knobloch and other Valmeyer officials and residents.
Pinter said that as time passes, residents begin to drop out of community rebuilding efforts.
"FEMA has to develop new procedures,’’ Pinter said. "They do a good job of handing out rations and sandbags with the water rising, but these mitigation solutions need to be put on equal footing and given an equal chance. It needs to happen when memories are still fresh and when feet are still wet.”
River engineer Gerald Galloway, who led the White House-appointed panel that drew lessons from the Great Flood, estimates that about 30,000 homes nationwide have been moved since 1993, but Valmeyer is the only example of a community that was able to patch together all of the federal and state systems to come up with the money to let everyone move.
"It was a Herculean effort of the mayor, Dennis Knobloch, that made this happen. You had a guy who really thought we ought to be doing this and he did it,'' said Galloway, a former brigadier general with the Army Corps of Engineers who is now a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland.
Residents were the glue
In the days after the evacuation -- and for long months afterward -- Valmeyer’s evacuees found housing where they could. Some moved in with relatives; others lived in temporary housing, including an encampment of more than 200 trailers in Waterloo dubbed “Femaville.”
"People will only tolerate that for a certain period,” Knobloch said.
A key to the village’s success was the citizens' committees that met weekly to discuss topics ranging from town design and school construction to finances.
The village signed a letter of intent to purchase the 500-acre farm tract for $6,000 an acre -- $3 million -- while still negotiating for government funding to pay for it. The financial assistance was vital, but it meant dealing with at least 25 different federal, state and local agencies.
Knobloch stepped away from his job to direct the efforts full-time. As mayor, he was paid $60 a month, but he said his family was able to make it financially because his wife had a job. In 1995, he resigned as mayor to take a temporary full-time position as village administrator that came with a salary.
Involving the residents in the process served a two-fold purpose. “It kept them busy, and it gave them buy-in. This was their plan. They created it,” he said.
The churches and school district also played a key role in holding the community together.
"Once we made the decision to relocate, the three churches in town jumped in and said, ‘We’re going to do the same thing.’ And they kept their congregations together during the process by meeting in various locations in the county for weekly worship services,’’ Knobloch said.
The flood came two weeks before school was to start, and district officials scrambled to come up with options, including one that would have parceled out Valmeyer students to nearby schools. But after parents insisted on keeping their school together, the district set up portable classrooms on the county fairgrounds about eight miles from the village. School buses collected Valmeyer students who were scattered about the area.
"Even though families were spread to all corners, they were still coming together as a school family. Kids were together during the day; the parents were still coming together for school functions,’’ Knobloch said.
Four months after the flood, the village held a formal groundbreaking at the new site on the bluffs. Residents were taken on hay wagons to pick out their new home sites and asked to plunk down 50 percent of the cost of the lots they chose. The village used the money -- about $500,000 -– as a downpayment for the land.
Keeping it normal
Sharon Sparwasser, a retired teacher, said she loves living in new Valmeyer, where her home backs up to woods. A bank of windows offers an expansive view of nature, which is particularly striking in the fall and spring.
Sparwasser wasn’t a Valmeyer resident during the flooding, but she taught third grade at the Valmeyer school. She served on the school committee during the relocation planning and was impressed with the process.
"Here there were ordinary people making decisions on infrastructure and financing,’’ she said.
In 1997, the Sparwassers moved to the new town from Waterloo.
Until the $11 million school building – which houses children from kindergarten through high school -- opened its doors in 1996, teachers and students made do in their portable trailers. High school students had a prom and put on plays, using the facilities of other area school. The sports teams -- the Pirates -– played all their games away. There was no playground for the elementary schoolchildren, but people donated balls and bats games jump ropes. The district had counselors available to work with teachers and students.
"We tried to keep everything as normal as we could,’’ she said.
These days, Sparwasser is serving on another village committee that is working to form a heritage museum to document Valmeyer’s unique history for future generations. The Great Flood of ’93 occurred before students who graduated this year from Valmeyer High School were born.
Older residents, though, will never forget 1993.
"Even though it was 20 years ago, I don’t think those who lived through that time will ever lose the memories,’’ she said.
Robert Koenig of the St. Louis Beacon contributed to this story.
A watershed moment
This summer marks the 20th anniversary of the Great Flood of 1993. While the flooding began in May and stretched into September, the Mississippi River crested in St. Louis at a record-breaking 49.6 feet on Aug. 1. St. Louis wasn't alone; many communities along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers experienced record crests and devastation. In a series of stories from reporters Robert Koenig and Mary Delach Leonard, the Beacon looks at the impact of the flood on floodplain management as well as two communities that suffered extraordinary damage.
