Valley Junction’s Worst Day 20 Years Ago Was Also Its Best: The Great Flood of 1993

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Blessings don’t always come wrapped in filthy, molding and stinking packages.

But by the time the sun dawned on August 20 years ago, West Des Moines officials had a clear vision of how to fix the murky mess left in its historic downtown by an out-of-control Raccoon River, one of scores of rivers and streams that left their banks across the Midwest in what still ranks as the worst summer of flooding on record.

Measurable rain had fallen in Iowa on all but two days during that July 20 years ago, making it the wettest month on record.

City officials had known a day like July 10, 1993, was coming for some time – since 1947, to be exact, when planning for a protective levee had begun. In what may be one of the ultimate ironies of the Great Flood of 1993, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had finally approved the levee and work was to begin within 18 months.

Having that project in the pipeline and other drainage improvements engineered and ready for funding put Valley Junction in a strong position for quick recovery, three city officials on the front line of the battle against the Raccoon River recalled last month in a conversation with Patch.

Community and Economic Development Director Clyde Evans, City Engineer Duane Wittstock and Parks and Recreation Director recalled July 10, 1993, the days, hours and even minutes leading up to it, a period they regard as some of Valley Junction’s worst and best days.

Innovative Responses Part of Lore

Counting heroes is risky business. No matter how exhaustive the enumeration, it’s easy to overlook one of the dozens of small moments that turned into big actions that saved the day.

Among them, Wittstock said, were the smart calculations of Denny Buyert, a senior engineering technician at the time and now public works director in Pella, IA.

Buyert kept a close eye on the river gauge near the confluence of the North and South branches of the Raccoon River at Van Meter, recorded its historic crest, potted the elevation data by hand on graph paper and was able to predict within a few inches how much floodwater Valley Junction would see.

In short, there would be more water than anyone had ever seen from a flood in Valley Junction, common as they were.

“Through the years, we collected engineering data that correlated the gauge reading at Van Meter to what the elevation would be down at the HIghway 28 bridge,” Wittstock said “We knew that it rained 9 or 10 inches in Jefferson, and we knew it was going to be a major event.”

Buyert’s prediction was “way above what anyone had seen before” and at odds with Corps of Engineers predictions, but officials followed their gut instincts and gathered residents, shopkeepers and others around a gazebo on Fifth Street.

The message: “Expect feets of water instead of inches, get your stuff out and do the best you can,” Wittstock said.

Some of the clever and ingenious responses to the disaster 20 years ago are so colloquial they beg for a position in lore.

Wittstock told of Randy Bracken, the fire chief at the time, who gauged the rise and fall of often troublesome Walnut Creek, by surveying where cattle were grazing in fields in the Waukee and Clive areas. If they were well up the side of a hill, look out: High water was on the way.

As the floodwaters inched closer to the route used in the back-and-forth relay to a gravel quarry for sand to build protective barriers around structures and the levee itself, workers placed stakes along the way. They were painted different colors in 12-inch increments, helping the heavy equipment drivers determine where the highway was and how much water covered it.

“That’s the kind of stuff that was going on that nobody saw,” Wittstock said. “There were hundreds of those things. People did what they needed to do.”

Volunteers Like Ants Building a Hill

Without that advance warning – 18 hours from the time Buyert recorded historically high water at the Van Meter gauge – the flood would have been economically devastating and lives might have been lost, Wittstock said.

It wasn’t that Valley Junction wasn’t accustomed to flooding, both floods that are relatively minor inconvenience and floods every 10 or 15 years that had been considered major until the 1993 floods.

They were adept, having perfected as routine a system of unplugging and removing hot water heaters, furnace and other appliances from basement mechanical rooms and moving them upstairs.

“The folks down in the houses each had little sewer plugs they put in their drains in their basements,” Wittstock said. “They were ready for it. This was just off the charts.”

For them, fighting flood had been “a community event that brings people together.”

“The word goes out there’s going to be a flood event, and we have 1,000 people down here just like that,” Wittstock said, snapping his finger. “You don’t see that anymore.”

That’s partly due to the security of the levee, built two feet higher than planned before the epic 1993 flood.

But in those days in Valley Junction, the volunteers were as unstoppable as the trains that turned Valley Junction from a coal mining community to a thriving center of commerce and still roll past original West Des Moines.

After Des Moines lost its water plant – an inconvenience residents would endure for nearly three weeks – volunteers showed up uninvited but on the cue of urgency at sandbagging central in West Des Moines, the site of the current Hillside Elementary School.

They filled so many sandbags and piled them so high around the West Des Moines Water Works treatment plant at 1505 Railroad Ave. that officials had to stop them.

“It got to the point that the sandbag wall around the facility was higher than the facility,” Evans recalled. “I remember saying to (then Water Works manager) Larry Anderson, ‘There’s going to be your weak point with the building because of all that pressure.’”

The volunteers were reluctant to stop.

“When he flood was at its peak, it was hard to get them to stop,” Wittstock said. “They wanted to go do something, but at that point, there wasn’t anything to do until the waters receded.”

$50,000 Investments in $25,000 Houses

When the river returned to its banks, city officials saw opportunity in all that muck.

Before the flood, officials had taken a hands-off approach to code enforcement in Valley Junction unless a violation was “really blatant.” Evans said. “But after the floods, the council saw this as an opportunity to make a real impact in Valley Junction and made a commitment that we wanted to preserve the neighborhood.

“They could have come in and cleared whole blocks, but were concerned we would lose the whole integrity of the neighborhood if we did that and displace a whole lot of people that had been lifelong residents and had family here for years and years,” he continued. “We spent a lot of money rehabbing houses $50-, $60,000 on a house that maybe had an assessed valuation of $25,000 before the flood.”

Some 400 homes were affected, some needing only minor repairs. For others, though, the floor drain plugs that had protected homes in the past caused floors to buckle and walls to collapse under the hydraulic pressure of the water.

“The people smartest were the ones who put water in basement with clear water,” Evans said.

About 400 homes were damaged and all but about 100 of them were saved.

For “months and months and months on end” after the flood, city officials ran rented end-loaders and trucks up and down residential streets, piled up to six feet high on both sides with debris, wrecked appliances and “whatever they could haul out,” Wittstock said.

The result is a shinier neighborhood and an increase in community pride.

“It was an opportunity for everybody to clean out a garage that hadn’t been cleaned out for years,” Wittstock said. “If you look back a couple of years later, it really cleaned up the neighborhood.”

The business district also went through a metamorphosis

Valley Junction earned its prized Main Street Iowa designation in 1987, had a new streetscape, was holding events and was by all accounts “thriving,” Scott said, but it was the shell of the community that earned a in 2012.

“It was a mix of people who were serious about their business and whose business was their hobby,” Scott said. “The floods knocked out the idea of the hobby business. The people who left where hobby businesses. The people who rebuilt were real business people, and they were committed to build back and build better.

“There was a sense of unity that wasn’t there.”

The flood control levee and other protections put in place also had a psychological effect, giving investors added security.

“People started putting in real money into these buildings,” Scott said.

“I think a lot of people will tell you the floods of 1993 although very traumatic for everybody, one best of things that happened because it allowed us to focus a lot of resources in a short amount of time to fixing a lot of things,” Evans said.

“Things we had been talking about for decades got done in a space of five years,” Scott said. “They had the money and the commitment was made to do something.”

Dollars were tighter then in West Des Moines, a community of about 34,000 at the time without the commercial-rich tax base that has allowed for many of the quality-of-life amenities that define the city today.

In fact, the floods helped accelerate two decades of robust growth in West Des Moines. After floodwaters swamped downtown Des Moines, several companies moved to drier ground in the suburbs. Some of them, like Wells Fargo & Co., never left and have increased their investments in West Des Moines.

“It was unfortunate for Des Moines,” Wittstock said, “but it worked out really well out here.”

History Etched in High Water Marks

The Great Flood of 1993 is history now, etched in high water marks on businesses and homes and in the memories of those who lived through it.

People from Valley Junction and West Des Moines showed up like they’d never shown up before or have since, and their numbers were buoyed by people from all over the country – mostly average people who wanted to help, but some famous, like President Bill Clinton and one of Iowa’s most powerful congressmen at the time, Neal Smith, who used his sway to clear already completed applications for public improvements in Valley Junction of bureaucratic red tape.

Businesses showed up with food. Area contractors stopped projects and showed up to help build the temporary levee. City officials “bought up every shovel in a 10-mile radius,” literally hundreds of shovels, Evans said, and residents and volunteers put them to good use.

“It was incredible the way people wanted to help,” Wittstock remembers. “It really brought the community together. They just picked up and did what they needed to do, and we haven’t really seen that since.”

In those days, disasters were communicated differently, with more redundancy and in different ways that Wittstock is almost nostalgic about in a high tech, high speed world that sends messages 140 characters at a time.

“We were fortunate to have a lot of people who knew a lot of people,” he said. “Today, we have all these emergency management procedures and processes. What we did differently there was essentially people knew the right people to call. We were going way faster than the emergency services part of the world was going at that time. They weren’t set up quite as well as they are today.”

Officials would bottle that comradery that defined the community 20 years ago if they could, and permanently embed it in West Des Moines.

“To build community, everything has to be moving in the same direction, and we had that,” Scott said. “It was like, ‘we have to do this right now,’ and everything followed that one focus. It’s hard to do unless you’re under risk. Everyone knew the goal. Everything else was secondary.”

Take a look back at our coverage of the Great Flood of 1993, the worst natural disaster in West Des Moines history:

• ‘We’re Evacuating … Valley Junction’s Under Water’: Watch Great Flood of 1993 Video
• For Florida Man and Iowa Woman, Disaster Breeds Romance
• Businesses Got By with a Little Help from their Friends and Strangers: Watch
• People Were Frantically Trying to Stop the Water ... It Was Terrifying: Red Cross Volunteer on 1993 Flood
• Survivor of Floods of '93 Says Disaster Was Blessing in Disguise for Valley Junction
• Preparation, Devastation and Comradery: The Great Floods of 1993 Photo Gallery
• Floods of '93 Timeline in West Des Moines