Politics & Government

Flood of 1993: How Gumbo Flats Became the Chesterfield Valley

In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Great Flood of 1993, Patch is publishing articles sharing the personal perspectives of those who lived through the event.

On the evening of July 30, 1993, shortly before the levee guarding Chesterfield Valley – then known by the more rustically charming name of Gumbo Flats – from the Missouri River failed and the flood waters rushed in, Michael Herring recalled breathing a sigh of relief.

 “I am standing there on top of the levee in between loads of sand bags and the water is probably about 12-18 inches below my feet, and I know that I am looking at 16-18 feet of water,” said Herring, who has served as the city administrator since it was incorporated in 1998.

Still, the heavy rains that began in the spring and continued into the summer had eased off slightly. Soon, the water might start receding instead of rising, he thought.

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 “It was a hot humid night, clear skies, and I am looking out at this water thinking, ‘Maybe we are going to dodge another one,’” he said.

But in the next moment, the word came over the walkie talkie – the levee had failed. Everyone was ordered to evacuate.

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Herring said it had been breached by what is known as a “sand boil.” The water hadn’t actually overtopped the levee, but had rather so saturated the earthen structure that a large portion of the hard dirt had been transformed into a soft mush.

The water began to bubble its way through, eventually creating a larger hole, and spreading more like a creeping, inexorable puddle than a surging tidal wave.

Herring’s first task was to travel back to City Hall, at the time located in an office building on Swingley Ridge Road, and call then Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan to inform him about what had happened and request a state of emergency.

Herring remained there for several hours, running on adrenaline, before calling it quits at 2 or 3 a.m. The next morning, he returned to city hall at 6 a.m. where a helicopter arranged by the St. Louis County Police was waiting.

“I remember getting up in the air and heading west and as you get to where you can see the Double Tree Hotel, you can also see this big lake behind the Double Tree that didn’t exist before,” Herring said. “As far as you can see, it’s all underwater.”

Overnight, the slowing seeping water had hit the levee on the other side of the Valley, and at that point, “it just filled up like a tub,” Herring said.

Responding to the Devastation

The feeling felt by Herring and many others in that moment was one of disbelief. It hardly seemed possible that it would be, 20 years later, a commercial mecca for the area, with two large outlet centers set to open this August.

Herring recalled what it took to get the city back to that point, describing it as an across-the-board effort that involved public agencies, business leaders, volunteers and residents.

 “I sensed an incredibly strong will by people who had been residents of the city long before it incorporated that they were going to recover from this, that it was going to be bigger and better than it was before,” he said.

Among those many individuals are two Herring said were “absolute heroes” in terms of saving the Valley, and that’s because in September of the same year, it nearly flooded again.

The city of Chesterfield was busy trying to turn Eatherton Road into a temporary levee at that time when water once again began pouring into the Valley from the Missouri River. As it crept up toward the not-yet-completed levee, Herring knew the city needed help.

Jim Talent, then a congressman representing the area, along with Lee McKinney, the former head of the Army Corps of Engineers in Chesterfield, were able to convince the Corps to take over the effort. Practically overnight, Herring said, the Corps brought in 60 dumptrucks and tons of other equipment. The race was on.

“They are working 24 hours a day doing everything they can to build this levee,” he said. “It’s now 7 feet, the water is 4 feet, it’s 8 feet, the water is 5 feet … the levee gets to be around 13 or 14 feet tall and the water stops at about 11 or 12 feet. We held it back.”

Rebuilding the Valley

The business owners and residents of the Valley were at the time in the middle of the hellish job of cleaning up the thick layer of black slime left behind by the flood. If they had been forced to start over, Herring estimates many of them would have just called it quits for good.

Two years and several more scares later, the city of Chesterfield finally officially joined with the Monarch Levee District to create the unified Chesterfield-Monarch Levee Protection District and performed major upgrades to the levee, transforming it into something that could sustain a 500-year flood event.

Herring said the investment to make this happen came about in part because of another kind of investment, one whose popularity with commercial developers have turned it into a dirty word – a tax increment financing district, or TIF.

A form of public financing that uses tax dollars to secure large bonds to redevelop “blighted” areas, the $75 million generated by the TIF paid to basically rebuild the Valley.

Herring said the funds were used to upgrade the levee, build the Boone’s Crossing interchange and construct Edison Avenue and emphasized that “not one cent” was spent on site improvement costs for developers.

Fast forward to the present day and the bustling scene that can be viewed from Highway 40 as one drives through Chesterfield offers no hints of what it looked like that July day in 1993. 

“The flood, the recovery from the flood, the prevention of the second flood, the TIF … all that combined created one of the single largest economic engines you are going to find in this engine,” Herring said. 

Although many people lost everything in the devastation, many more returned and rebuilt, and the one-time expanse of farm land known as Gumbo Flats became the retail hub that is the Valley. 

(Click here to read the previous article in this series, "Community, Love and Sheer Force of Will Help Restore Farm")


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