Seeing this picture made me a little dizzy. When I lived in Aledo, my closest friend in the community was from Keithsburg. Her mom was the mayor. In ’93, she told me that the Corps went around and spraypainted lines on all the telephone poles, to warn people how high the water was going to get in their homes after they blew the levee. And she said, “I don’t have a line on my telephone pole.”
And the guy from the Corps said, “You don’t have a home.”
She said that they were not allowed to go back to their homes while they were flooded, but that some of the men in town would sneak back in at night in row boats to go on expeditions to childrens’ second-floor bedrooms to retrieve long abandoned stuffed animals, because kids who had not needed the comfort of a toy in years couldn’t sleep in strange places.
If this is the building I think it is, it used to house a pool hall. The woman who owned it was convinced that she and my friend had inadvertently cursed the town, that it was their fault it flooded.
I think this was supposed to make it somewhat just that they lost their homes.
The strategy then was that the government would not rebuilt your house in the flood plain. They were just, slowly, abandoning the original sight of the town to the river.
If you look at the empty lots on Google Maps now, you can guess that they’ve continued this plan. I don’t know how it’s set up now, but when I was there, there was a levee along the Mississippi and then a levee along the creek just north of town. When the Mississippi flooded, it backed up into the creek. They blew the levee along the creek to try to keep the levee along the river functioning. That’s why Lincoln Street was lost.
If you look at the patterns the empty lots make, you can guess that’s probably how it flooded in 2008 as well. Their FEMA map doesn’t make me feel too confident about the viability of Jackson Street, either.
I think Keithsburg will vanish in my lifetime. And that makes me sad. To put it mildly.
I remember my friend’s mom’s anger at the Corps, years later. But what can you do? Some folks in town believed that the river used to flood more often before the levees went in, but not as severely. But none of them lived in Mississippi or Arkansas in ’29.
So, who can say?
Sometimes, it’s heartbreaking, but you can’t fix it.
Filed under: America how can I write a holy litany in your silly moo
Would the Corps warn people before they were going to blow the levees so those whose homes would be flooded or submerged would have enough time to collect their belongings and leave in time? Or did they just blow it up at a random time and nobody really knew when it would be?
Yes, they went around town, put the marks on the telephone poles, had a town meeting and told everyone they needed to have their belongings above those marks. If you didn’t have a mark, it meant that there wasn’t going to be any place in the house that didn’t have water in it. No safe high ground.
Then, they told them when they were going to blow the levee a few days later. When the day came, they blew the tornado sirens three times and then blew the levee.
My friend said that there was a wall of water and her first emotion was relief, because she could see her house and it wasn’t under water. She thought the Corps had been wrong. And then she realized it was off its foundation and just floating through town.
The government built her a new house up on the bluff.
But either levee could have given out at any time, so it’s not like the Corps had a lot of choice. They were trying to save the levee that would have been harder to replace.
But if Wikipedia is right and they lost two levees in ’08, that had to be the new one along the creek and the old one along the river. As far as I know, there were only two levees.
Still, a lot of hard feelings toward the Corps.
I didn’t live in Arkansas or Mississippi in ’29, but that’s exactly how it goes with levees. I absolutely despise them as a tool because they make the extreme floods so much worse, and most people that live near them think they’re safe when they aren’t.
Well, it occurs to me that ’29 was a bad counter example, because clearly they had levees or no one would have been sitting on the levee and moaning in the blues songs otherwise.
Keithsburg’s contention is/was that, before the levee, they flooded every year, but they compensated by raising much of the downtown up half a flight. The town was built to flood every year and they knew to what height the water got.
Once the levees went in they no longer flooded every year (hence the reason the newer homes were one-story in what used to be old flood plain), but when they did flood, the devastation was unparalleled.
Obviously, I don’t know what Keithsburg looked like in the 1880s and 1890s, but I know that, even when i was there, after the ’93 flood, the town was still full of 100 year old houses and buildings that had survived decades of flooding. But they couldn’t withstand ’93 and ’08. Looking just at Google maps and seeing what is missing is kind of shaking.