Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 2000
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 4, Fall 2000, pp. 297-310.
Abstract
In May 1950 the Little Nemaha River valley in the southeastern quadrant of Nebraska suffered a record-breaking flood. For a short time at the town of Syracuse, the Little Nemaha River, which drained a watershed of 218 square miles, had an estimated discharge of 225,000 cubic feet per second. This was larger than any flood recorded since 1928 on the Missouri River at Omaha, which drained a watershed of 322,000 square miles! During this storm and flood twenty-three people lost their lives, fourteen in the Little Nemaha Valley. As night came on, floodwaters swept a commercial bus off a highway northwest of Syracuse; only three of nine in the bus would survive. A young mother and father had their two infant sons torn from their arms as they abandoned their automobile on a nearby minor tributary. At daybreak, sixty miles downriver at Auburn, a family of four on their way to a funeral in Kansas had their car stall out on an approach to a bridge over the Little Nemaha. Witnesses saw the waters take them one by one. These deaths were only the most visible manifestations of the disaster. Homes, businesses, vehicles, and domestic livestock were lost. Sloping fields on uplands lost topsoil in depths "up to the plow sole"; fields down on the flood plain would be covered at places by five feet of thi~ topsoil. Railroads, bridges, and roads suffered severe damage. People were stranded in attics as their houses floated downstream; some spent horrifying hours lodged high up in trees, hoping floating debris would miss them. One family between Syracuse and Auburn was barely able to remain safe for seven hours on the tiny island that was the roof of their pickup truck. 2 It was a situation way beyond human control. Most people would consider it a clear example of natural disaster.
Here I examine the history of flooding on the Little Nemaha as a case study of human relationships to a common form of natural hazard. Through the history of human responses to a particular river in flood, I also seek understanding of the variety of human roles in creating natural disaster out of this common hazard of flooding. Natural hazards exist when humans have made themselves vulnerable to nature's forces. As I am using the term, "natural disaster" refers to the situation after the hazard has fulfilled its potentiality, that is, after natural forces have negatively impacted humans. The Little Nemaha affords a useful vehicle for studying these relationships because of its history of repeated flooding. The record-breaking 1950 flood is not important simply as a case of an extreme natural event. It derives part of its instructive power for us (and for Syracuse residents) because people expended such effort protecting themselves from flooding. The lesson residents might have taken from the event was that they could ill afford to ignore a river's natural propensity to flood. Had they considered this carefully, it might have challenged their confidence in the adequacy of using technology to reengineer natural processes.
NATURAL DISASTERS
Human complicity in a natural hazard, while being a cause, is also a result; it arises from something else. I argue that one type of natural disaster followed from basic human perceptions toward, and use of, nature. Floods do not start without unusually intense or prolonged precipitation (discounting dam breaks). The record-breaking 1950 Syracuse flood followed from extraordinary (though not record) rainfall amounts on two watersheds that converged on Syracuse at the same time. Other floods on this river also began with good rains, and, in fact, some storms on the river have had greater total amounts, and higher rates of precipitation, than during this flood. While southeast Nebraska is primarily rural without large centers of population, the people who do live in the Little Nemaha Valley have made themselves particularly vulnerable. They have done so through both their settlement patterns (living in a flood plain) and land usage (farming row crops on marginal prairie land).
Unfortunately, in arriving at causation for natural disaster, a model of natural disaster as an extreme environmental event meeting a vulnerable human population (as a function of size or usage) is not quite complete. An entry here may be through the phrase "nature is neutral." Is it not the point that for humans nature is not neutral? It is not neutral on two sides of our event. Nature created conditions which humans found attractive: rich farmland on flood plains and amenable transportation route possibilities. This is not a perceived neutral nature, it is a beneficent nature. And what of the event itself? During or after a flood, nature is anything but neutral. Humans often perceive it as a malevolent force. Nature is an entity divorced from its beneficent aspect in human perception. It calls for responses both immediate and long term. And the repeated experience of flooding in Southeastern Nebraska brought changes in human responses. But the responses also fell within carefully circumscribed limits. I would contend that the inhabitants' responses flowed from their basic perceptions toward, and use of, nature.
Comments
Copyright 2000 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln