All spring and into the summer of 1993, beyond the notice of the outside world, the heavens opened up above the central United States, a steady stream at first and then biblical torrents that drowned the soil and forced the Mississippi River to climb over its banks. This was not the flash flood of a single storm but the slow, steady rise of a makeshift sea that over the weeks and months would drape itself over entire towns in nine Midwestern states. By June, the Father of Waters and its tributaries had run out of room and were returning to their primordial plains, lingering for as many as 200 days.
As The New York Times's Chicago bureau chief, I was covering the crisis from my base 1,000 miles away when reports began surfacing of river crests beyond anything ever recorded. When Des Moines was shut down after the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers overran their dikes, engulfing the municipal water treatment station, I was on a plane to Iowa. From my window seat, I could see the roof caps of houses poking up from the river water like buoys.
Covering disasters requires a certain kind of accelerated metabolism. There were few cellphones back then, no GPS and no laptops, but instead hulking processors weighing close to 15 pounds. Thus I arrived with pens, notebooks and instinct.
The year before, I had covered Hurricane Andrew in South Florida. A homeowner corrected me when I marveled at his refrigerator being blown to his front yard: 'That's not my refrigerator.'
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing