The Flood of 1993: What Iowa Learned the Hard Way

The summer of nineteen ninety-three was the wettest in Iowa's recorded history. After an abnormally wet spring, the rains in June and July came relentlessly, week after week, without the typical dry intervals that allow river systems to recover between storms. The soil was already saturated. The rivers had no room.

On July eleventh, the Des Moines Water Works, which served three hundred thousand people in the metro, was inundated when the Raccoon River crested at its highest recorded level. The water treatment plant on Fleur Drive was flooded. The plant went offline. For twelve days, the residents of Des Moines had no municipal water. They could not drink from taps. They could not flush toilets. They could not wash hands. They could not fight fires with municipal supply.

The National Guard delivered bottled water. People lined up at distribution points across the city. Restaurants closed. Laundromats closed. Hospitals ran on backup systems. The Greater Des Moines water outage was, at the time, the largest peacetime disruption of municipal water supply in American history.

The disaster also played out across the broader Iowa landscape in ways that reshaped how the United States thought about floodplain management. The Mississippi River and its tributaries broke records at hundreds of monitoring stations. Fifty people died in the nineteen ninety-three Great Midwest Flood, which affected nine states. Damages were estimated at fifteen billion dollars, roughly equivalent to thirty billion dollars in today's value.

Iowa changed after nineteen ninety-three. Floodplain maps were redrawn. FEMA buyout programs purchased some of the most vulnerable properties, moving people off the floodplain permanently. The water works facility was rebuilt on higher ground. The Raccoon River Greenbelt that borders the river on the western edge of Des Moines was expanded partly as a flood buffer.

The flood of nineteen ninety-three is the reason modern Des Moines looks the way it does along its rivers. The waterfront parks and trail systems were not built purely for recreation. They were built because leaving the riverbanks open was cheaper than fighting the water again.