In the summer of 1993, the Missouri River rose out of its banks and into Rocheport. It was part of the Great Flood of 1993, one of the most destructive and prolonged floods in American history — and in this town, as in so many along the river, it is remembered less for the damage than for who showed up to fight it.
A flood without precedent
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the 1993 flood on the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers was extraordinary in both scale and duration: months of heavy rain across the basin sent rivers over their banks through the summer, breaking records at gauge after gauge and causing billions of dollars in damage across nine states. The Missouri stayed high for weeks, testing every low-lying town along its length.
Neighbors with sandbags
In Rocheport, the response looked like a lot of the river valley that summer: volunteers — many from nearby Columbia — turning out to fill and stack sandbags against the rising water. The story that residents tell is one of a small town holding the line with a lot of borrowed hands, and then setting about the long work of cleaning up and coming back.
A quiet high-water mark
Around town, small reminders of the flood endure — including a modest marker of how high the water reached, the kind of thing you might walk past without knowing what it records. More than three decades later, the Flood of 1993 sits in living memory here: a hard summer that also showed the town what its neighbors were made of.
Sources
- U.S. Geological Survey, The Great Flood of 1993: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/cm-water/science/great-flood-1993
- Missourinet, “Missourians impacted by the Great Flood of 1993 remember, 25 years later”: https://www.missourinet.com/2018/07/02/missourians-impacted-by-the-great-flood-of-1993-remember-the-experience-25-years-later/