ST. LOUIS - The Summer of 1993 was one full of rain and lots of it.
All that summer, the meteorologists explained to everyone that there was a system that was stalled over the middle of the country and it was just hovering there.
Even on days that it didn't rain, you couldn't help but wonder if it was raining upstream, since you would hear about how it would rain in Iowa or up in Louisiana, Missouri and it was heading straight to St. Louis.
Before the floods began, there were plenty of visits to sand bags town like Clarksville, Foley and Elsberry, and places where people were shoveling fast into burlap bags and stacking them right there where the water was rising in the background and others were hauling furniture into trucks or just up the steps from the living room into the upstairs.
Plenty of people were told to get out to evacuate but they didn't want to go. I remember there was a man who lived in a little white house perched on the bluff along the Meramec River in Fenton, Missouri. It was just like a shack on the river and he was a bearded man with determination.
The man told me he was going to ride it out, but officials told him that the water was getting too close. So they made him give it up.
There were some big personalities who came through for the flood of 1993. South African Bishop Desmond Tutu toured the river to pear sandbagging effort. He was with Congressman Dick Gephardt and I remember asking Tutu "If he was going to sandbag too?"
But he just smiled at me and kept on touring the sites.
Then there was Missouri Sen. Kit Bond, a hard tech kind of man, a general grand of a speaker. He looked around the damage in Arnold gave a very damning statement on the flood.
"This flood is biblical," Bond said.
The end finally came the night of the Crest, as the high water rolling down the Mississippi from town to town.
I was back in the newsroom typing on the desk, trying to summarize the latest developments. But as the Crest went from town to town, it kept on changing. It got to the Eads Bridge area finally and swooped away some of
the boats moored along the riverfront. I think the River Boat McDonald's and the Taco Bell got hit pretty badly.
After that night, things gradually gradually got better and the 'Great Flood of 1993' became the 'Great Clean Up of 1993'. It was a story of power hosing out the mud, insurance claims and looking for lost cat. We had endured an historic flood that Kit Bond said "It Was Biblical."