Men Against the River

From Sioux City downstream 100 miles to Omaha, men fought a desperate battle against the mighty, muddy Missouri River. Like a huge inland tidal wave, 20 miles long and moving at a speed of nine miles an hour, the flood crest smashed at banks and levees, swallowed up great stretches of fertile farmland and laid siege to half-empty towns and cities, holding out behind their sandbag barricades (see NEWS IN PICTURES). The critical point last week came at the narrow channel between Omaha and Council Bluffs, where a levee and flood wall system was designed to keep the river in a course only 1,200 feet wide.

For six days and nights an army of volunteer floodfighters, under U.S. Army Engineers, swarmed to the levees to buttress their ramparts against "C-Hour" ("C" for crest). Flashboards (double wooden fences with earthen fill between) were thrown up to give the dikes more height. Trucks and bulldozers worked around the clock, pushing up secondary levees wherever the battering flood water weakened the primary wall.

At some spots the water forced its way under the levees and burst upward in erupting "sand boils." Emergency crews hurriedly closed them off and smothered them with sandbags. It was exhausting, unrelenting, muddy toil, organized with a precision and teamwork learned from years of hard experience.

C-Hour. The river rose, a brown, swirling fury in a straitjacket, pushing with enormous force at the restraining walls, threatening to saturate the levees to the point where they would disintegrate. Along the levees guarding Omaha's airfield, the flood pressed by, 15 feet higher than the runways. Some 30,000 people were evacuated from the low-lying residential districts of Council Bluffs. By car and truck the evacuees hauled off what they could, trying to decide between the television set and the washing machine. Householders filled their basements with water to equalize the river pressure and save the foundations. Gas station attendants pumped their tanks full of water to keep out the river's silt.

The crest touched 30.24 feet. Then, slowly, the waters crept back down the markers on the rivermen's gauges. But the flood, even as it fell, showed its awesome power. The suction of the receding waters pulled huge chunks of muck from the levees. On the Omaha shore, the river forced its way into sewer outlets and gushed out with enough strength to lift a truck-trailer off the street and to buckle 120 feet of concrete pavement. Army engineers quickly dropped a lattice of steel I-beams across the sewer outlets, then jammed up the barrier with sandbags by the thousands. It worked.

The Toll. Omaha and Council Bluffs were saved from devastation. Downstream lay other cities girded for the flood. The Missouri's crest would continue to inflict damage on the countryside, where farmers' "private" levees could not withstand it. The Army's Chief of Engineers, Lieut. General Lewis Pick, summarized the toll exacted by the Mighty Muddy as its flood passed down river from Omaha: 27 railroads blocked, 83 main highways broken, 87,000 persons displaced, 50 cities & towns flooded, 2,000,000 farm acres swamped, 153 private levees breached--a total of $200 million damage, which would yet go higher.

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