For shrinking Mississippi River towns, frequent floods worsen fortunes

Homes outside the protected area got swamped, though. Much of the flooding was from Bear Creek as the Mississippi backed up into it.

Over the years, silt from the river has worked its way into the creek, clogging storm drains and worsening flash flooding, Mayor Barry Louderman said.

Louderman estimated at least a half-dozen companies that employed a combined 300 to 400 people “are just gone, were never replaced,” due to persistent flooding. First Street’s models show Hannibal would have likely grown over the last two decades if not for flooding.

Steve Dungan has lived on Ely Street near Bear Creek all of his 54 years. As a child, he fished from the porch when the creek rose.

One summer night in 1993, Dungan was at a hospital in nearby Quincy, Illinois, where his wife was about to give birth to their daughter. He got a call that the water was coming up fast, and relatives and friends were scurrying to salvage what they could from his home by boat.

“We lost the waterbed, stove, refrigerator — stuff they couldn’t pack out,” he said.

With family anchoring him to the area, he chose to stay.

Ray Allen, another longtime Ely Street resident who also operated an auto repair and welding shop there, did not. He recalled being awakened by a noise during that 1993 flooding.

“Jumped up out of bed and was standing in water knee-deep beside the bed,” Allen, now 80, recalled. “That’s a rude awakening, I’ll tell you that.”

The government bought out nearly all of the homes on Ely Street and in many other neighborhoods vulnerable to Bear Creek. People scattered. Some, like Allen and his wife of 63 years, Rachel, left town, though they moved back about 12 years ago and now live high on a hill.

He misses his old friends and neighbors on Ely Street.

“All of the people that were good friends down there kind of got busted apart,” he said.

West Alton is a two-hour drive downriver from Hannibal. In 1993, Sugar Vanburen watched as most of her mobile home floated down the river. Only what was bolted down remained — the floor, a toilet and furnace.

Her sister left, but not Sugar. It’s where she grew up. She likes the quiet community. Her grandchildren go to a good school. Residents learn how to empty mud from the basement and get neighbors to help clean up.

After the 1993 flood, the Federal Emergency Management Agency offered buyouts to some facing severe flood risk. Recently, letters for a new round of voluntary buyouts went out.

Sugar threw hers away. But Robert Myers, St. Charles County’s planning and zoning division director, said the goal is to buy out as many as 100 homes across the county.

Mayor Richter recalls the West Alton of decades ago: three churches, an ice cream shop, four taverns where people hung out.

“Now we don’t have any churches. We have one tavern that’s open and it just got reopened not too long ago,” he said. “A lot of that community stuff is gone.”

Tom Silk lives next to a vacant lot that was once home to the church he attended and where he married.

Silk likes the town. It’s rural, peaceful. But it takes work to stay. His front door still bears the water stain right at the handle marking the 2019 flood — second-highest on record.

That year, he packed up a U-Haul and left for about two months. It took a year and a half to repair his house — he did the work after finishing shifts loading trucks at a FedEx warehouse — but he wanted to stay.

“It’s quiet, it is the country life, but … you are still by the city if you need to do anything or go anywhere,” he said.

Richter said flooding is so frequent that he probably wouldn’t live in town if he didn’t grow up locally, farm and have strong community connections. The town has organized July 4 celebrations and a flea market family fun day in the fall. People come back. But there’s a sense of loss.

Vanburen misses neighbors who moved away.

“Everybody’s gone,” she said. “This is a ghost town.”

Cairo, Illinois, is surrounded by a levee at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. It’s endured a lot.

First rising as a hub for steamboats in the 19th century, Cairo peaked around 1920 with about 15,000 people, including a sizeable Black population. It had attractive retail shops, several rail lines and a healthy manufacturing sector. It was also strictly segregated, and protests in the 1960s met violence that spiraled for years. The city has hemorrhaged people during a downward economic trend that’s never stopped, according to local historian Klinkenberg.

Its population today is about 10% of peak. Retail and manufacturing are gone. For a long time, it didn’t have a grocery store. Most of the place is abandoned, with brick buildings cracked by growing trees.