I stood atop a 30-foot-tall levee on the banks of the Mississippi River near Quincy, Illinois, on July 25th, 1993. I peered over the edge, piled about 4-feet high by sandbags that stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction.

The other side of the levee two feet in front of 25-year-old me was the brown, murky, raging torrent of the flooding Mississippi River. On the other side, it was 30 feet deep. It was a terrifying place to stand as farmers, Illinois National Guardsmen, inmates from a nearby prison, and volunteers from every city, town, and village around worked together for weeks to save their farmland and communities. They came out every day to fill sandbags and throw them up like bricklayers 30 feet to the top of the levee. It was an unpleasant, humid place to be in the baking sun with no shade, endless mosquitos, and giant biting horse flies.

This was the day that a portion of the 54-mile-long Sny Levee that I was standing on succumbed to the powers of the mighty Mississippi River and collapsed.

I was covering the Flood of the Century as a news reporter for the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, a daily newspaper serving Central Illinois and its State Capitol city Springfield. This tragic event was officially dubbed by the United States Geological Survey as a “500-year flood.”

More than 30 people died, thousands were injured and an estimated $15 billion in damage occurred along rivers in the states of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and South Dakota. It was the largest and most costly natural disaster ever to hit the United States.

If you lived in metro Detroit, New York, Los Angeles or anywhere else in the world other than the heartland of the United States, you probably barely knew anything about it. Sure there was CNN and some other St. Louis and Springfield, Ill., news channels covering it, but there was no internet, no Twitter, no Facebook, and no Instagram to share reels about this horrendous disaster. Eventually the New York Times and Washington Post determined it was a big enough story and sent out reporters to cover it.

As a news reporter, I was a neutral observer covering the disaster of a lifetime. I was there to document it. Thirty years later this month, I’m here to retell some of that story.

April 1993 in Jacksonville, Ill, where I lived, the weather was unusually wet. That trend continued into May and June. Then the skies opened up. I remember there were severe storms that I reported on at the time. On one day in particular, most of Central Illinois recorded 6 inches of rain. In Quincy, Ill, which was an hour west, the Mississippi River rose two feet in one night. That was just the beginning.

But it wasn’t regional rainfall that caused the Flood of the Century. It started up in Minnesota where the Mississippi River and all of its vast tributaries began.

The U.S. National Parks Service estimates that it takes 90 days for a drop of water to travel from where the Mississippi River begins at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the mouth where it enters the Gulf of Mexico — a distance of 2,552 miles. In that summer of 1993, trillions of drops of water lost their way as they crushed through levee after levee along Midwest rivers and flooded city after city and farmland after farmland.

Towns were cut off by raging floods, U.S. interstate highways were flooded for weeks, bridges connecting communities were submerged. These weren’t floods that lasted a week, but months. Author Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, MO, was flooded for 174 days. Across the river in Quincy, the town was under water for 152 days. I witnessed it all and it was horrendous.

In mid June, my Editor-in-Chief Bob Unger said, “Alright, Varcie, you’re our flood reporter. Go out every day to the floods and file 2 stories a day.”

In the beginning, I mostly wrote human interest stories about families, business owners, and Illinois farmers coping with all the rain and spotty flooding. But as the Illinois and Mississippi rivers started swelling and getting closer to rercord flood stages, everything started changing.

Geographically, the Mississippi River borders the entire west side of Illinois. The Illinois River cuts straight through the heart of Illinois and meets up with the Mississippi River at St. Louis. MO.

Enter in the small village of Hardin, IL. It sits just above the St. Louis metropolitan area smack dab between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. When the rivers started flooding, so did the bridges into Hardin and there was no way in or out. The residents of the tiny village were trapped.

My assistant editor Oliver Weist called me to his office one morning: “Hey Varcie – the town of Hardin, Ill, is completely blocked off by the floods. The Illinois National Guard is offering the Press a ride on a helicopter to go into the town and deliver supplies. I want you to go in and report on it.”

I drove to East St. Louis, Ill, from Jacksonville with our staff photographer Jeffrey L. Brown. We boarded a Bell Huey helicopter along with a news crew from St. Louis and a CNN crew, including journalist Charles Jaco, who was best known for his coverage of the Gulf War in 1991.

We flew over miles and miles of flooded cities and farmland. We flew over an airport with half-submerged aircraft. I saw houses protected by sandbag moats with floodwaters surrounding them. My heart sank. My stomach was ill, and not from the helicopter ride. This was a major disaster in our country.

We flew for 40 miles and the scenery below didn’t change. It was a sea of flooded water and carnage from the explosive Mississippi River.

We landed at a school play area in the tiny village of Hardin. Illinois National Guardsmen unloaded boxes of food and supplies to the elementary school. Me, my photographer, Charles Jaco, and the other journalists jumped off the helicopter to start documenting history.

Jeffrey and I did what any journalist would do. We climbed to the highest vantage point in town to survey the area and damage, which happened to be one of the partially submerged bridges connected to the village. I walked through floodwaters chest deep to get to the bridge and grasped for the steel bridge girders as I got closer. I saw a bloated, dead hog floating 10 feet away. A few more feet away I watched a snake slither through the waters.

I held my camera bag and news reporter notebook high in my right hand and my newly purchased 200 mm camera lens for my Canon Rebel EOS camera in my left hand. I tripped on something — probably a curb — and went under water. I held up my right hand and saved my notebook and camera bag, but my left hand went into the water and I dropped my very expensive 200 mm camera lens.

Crap! Actually, I remember screaming, “Fuck!”

I got to the bridge and climbed the girders up until there were steel steps to get to the top. I climbed, which seemed like 200 feet, and arrived at the top of the bridge. Everywhere around was water. It was all flooded. I jotted some notes and our photographer shot a roll of film. This town was in for a serious disaster because the water levels were still rising and the water around the village was closing in.

Jeffrey and I climbed down from the bridge and went into town where we met up with an Illinois National Guard sergeant who drove us on a boat around the flooded area.

The damage caused by the floodwaters was incomprehensible. Floodwaters were half way up to the walls of the village town hall, gas stations, homes, schools, businesses. We passed a cemetery where we could see the top half of crosses and tombstones. There were reports of caskets floating down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers.

I remember talking to some of the residents who had sandbags piled around their houses and already 6 inches of water was in their basements. They grabbed every valuable they could and took it to the highest ground in town in case the entire village became submerged.

Fortunately, when flood waters finally receded almost 2 months later, Hardin, Ill, was spared.

But many towns throughout the Midwest along the rivers weren’t so lucky.

Let’s go back to July 25th, 1993 when I was standing on the Sny Levee near Quincy, Ill. This encompassed the area of East Hannibal, IL, and the small Illinois villages of Hull and Kinderhook. Across the mighty Mississippi was Hannibal, MO. These are the areas where Illinois National Guard troops set up camps. Farmers and residents from these communities went out every day in June and July and tirelessly lugged sandbags up to the tops of levees to stop the Mississippi River from destroying their homes and farmland.

The raging floodwaters were nearly to the top of the sandbag fortress atop the levee. The Illinois Army Corp of Engineers and the state government had already issued evacuation orders by this point. But dedicated people remained behind to save the farmland from the floods and continued piling up sandbags to almost record-breaking heights.

Compared to the weeks that preceded this, what remained behind now was only a handful of die-hard volunteers determined to beat Mother Nature. But the writing was on the wall. It was only a matter of time before the levee broke.

Then it happened.

I stood on the Sny Levee around 11 am and looked in the distance as water shot out from the middle of the 30-foot high levee. It was like someone shot a firehose of water through the middle of the levee. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

Someone screamed through a nearby radio, “There’s a breach in the levee!! There’s a breach in the levee!! Everyone evacuate!”

Illinois National Guardsman Staff Sgt. Charles Walters whisked me and a few others away to a nearby Humvee and we raced along a dirt roadway in cornfields a couple miles all the way to the high bluffs overlooking the river. Farmers and local residents piled into their pickup trucks and followed along with us.

By the time we got there, we could see the breach and it was spreading. It looked like Niagara Falls with water pouring over and through the levee. No one could stop it now. I wrote in a Journal-Courier article about the disaster that water from the breach flooded an area of farmland three times the size of Manhattan, NY.

It was reported later that everyone escaped from the levee, but at least nine people climbed into nearby trees that were filled with snakes. The survivors reportedly grabbed the snakes from branches and threw them into the water, but the snakes climbed back into the trees again and wrapped themselves around the survivors legs. Eventually, the survivors were rescued by the Illinois National Guard. No word about the snakes!

The months went on, more levees were breached, and more farmland and cities were leveled. But the floodwaters eventually subsided in September, leaving the Midwest with a devastation this country has never seen. It would take years to recover the financial losses. Farmland would have to be replanted and cities rebuilt.

I left the newspaper shortly after that and moved back to Michigan where I continued my journalism career at the Dearborn Press and Guide newspaper. But I found out that our Journal-Courier news staff won an award from the National Newspaper Association for coverage of the floods. I’m fortunate enough that I recorded history and also that I saved some of those old newspapers, photographs, and my Reporter’s Notebook from 1993 so that I could share it today.