The scene is overwhelming in the Midwest this week, where river water is rising into homes and businesses. Forecasts are calling for record or near-record crests of the Mississippi River and its tributaries as a week of torrential rainfall drains out of the basin. More than 20 people have died in the floods and the worst is yet to come.
The disastrous river flooding is the result of a month’s worth of excessive rainfall, most of which has fallen over the past week. In the past four days, 6 to 12 inches of rain has fallen across a vast area of the Midwest from Illinois to northeast Texas. Some locations are running 8 inches above normal for the month of December. Dozens of new rainfall records were set over the weekend, in some cases doubling or even tripling old records for Dec. 26 and 27.
Now all of that surplus rain is draining through tributaries that are swollen well beyond their banks into the Mississippi River. Around 400 river gauges across the Eastern U.S. have been in flood stage since Monday.
More than 20 people have died from the flooding alone — to say nothing of the 20 people that lost their lives in deadly tornado outbreaks on Dec. 23 and 26. In a press conference on Tuesday, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon cited 13 deaths up until that point in his state, noting that 12 of them were totally preventable: they drove into the floodwater.
In St. Louis, the National Weather Service says to expect “major to historic” river flooding through the weekend. The Mississippi is forecast to crest at 43 feet — a full 13 feet above flood stage, and one of the city’s top three river crests on record.
Downstream from St. Louis in Chester, Ill., the Mississippi River is forecast to crest at 49.8 feet, which would set a new record for the location, surpassing the old record of 49.7 feet which was set during the Great Flood of 1993. That flood was the second-worst flooding disaster since the Great Flood of 1927, and in some locations became the worst flooding disaster on record. Damage totals for the Great Flood of 1993 topped $15 billion.
What is so incredible about this week’s flooding is not only the magnitude, but the timing. To put this flood into perspective, all of the historic crests along the Mississippi have occurred during the spring melting season or the summer rainy months. In Chester, only a single wintertime flood has made it into the top 10 crests on record — 39.71 feet on Dec. 9, 1982. Not coincidentally, December of 1982 was also right in the middle of the strongest El Niño on record at the time.
