But that wasn't the case in the summer of 1993. ![]() The other four were "within 50 yards," Hammer claimed.Īccording to Hammer, Mississippi River levees were designed for a quick rise and fall. Hammer said the conditions were so obvious that he showed six fellow soil scientists and geologists a map of the area, and two of them correctly guessed the exact point of the levee failure. Levee built on a "crevasse splay" (fan-shaped sand deposit left by pre-levee floods). Less than 250 feet of riparian forest between levee and main river channel.Ħ. Wing dikes (built perpendicular to riverbank) are upstream of levee.ĥ. Levee is located downstream from a bridge.Ĥ. River bends after a straight course of at least 3/4 of a mile.ģ. River is constricted against a hard surface (e.g. All six existed at the West Quincy levee site, convincing him the levee was already vulnerable. The study found six factors that increase the probability of a levee failure. In the wake of the Great Flood of '93, Hammer participated in a multi-disciplinary analysis of the 1,083 levees that succumbed to floodwaters along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. He told that "it wasn't a matter of if that levee would fail, but when." Hammer was one of two soil science experts who testified in Scott's defense at his nationally televised 1998 retrial. ![]() David Hammer, a professor and soil scientist at the University of Missouri's Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, told that if someone had tried to sabotage the waterlogged West Quincy levee, it would have been "suicide." Scott, who did not take the stand at either of his trials, insists to this day that he did nothing wrong.Īnd he has at least one expert on his side. He received a retrial in 1998 due to a technicality, and the sensational wife-stranding story did not come up. Scott told Pitluk he had "no idea where Flachs' story came from."Ī jury deemed Scott guilty of the catastrophe charge in 1994. Joe Flachs, a prosecution witness at Scott's original 1994 trial, claimed that Scott had boasted of a plan to deliberately break the levee in order to strand his wife on the opposite side of the river so he could continue partying.īut Scott told Adam Pitluk, author of Damned to Eternity: The Man Who Caused a Flood, that once his car was out of the shop the next day, he drove the five-hour detour to get across the river to pick up his wife. The night the levee broke, the last open Mississippi River bridge to Quincy was rendered useless, as its approaches in the river's flood plain were quickly inundated. On top of what police believed was suspicious behavior, they also believed Scott had a motive. He claimed he was trying to help, but those police interviews resulted in Scott being charged with "causing catastrophe," a 1979 Missouri law that had never before been prosecuted. Scott told police he had moved some of those sandbags on the day of the breach because water was coming through a gap where there were no sandbags. A layer of sandbags was laid on top of the plastic sheets to hold them in place.īut on July 16, that final step to fortify the levee was still a work in progress. Prior to the breach, the original earthen levee had been raised by topping it with 15 feet of dredged sand, which in turn was covered by plastic sheets to reduce erosion. But they really wanted to speak with him about the July 16 levee break. That fall, police arrested Scott on suspicion of several burglaries. "He looked suspicious, he acted suspicious," he told the Quincy television station. ( WATCH: WGEM-TV video of fateful 1993 interview)īaker, now retired, told KHQA-TV in a February 2013 interview that Scott's unsure answers – and his appearance – didn't jibe with a man who'd been working the levee all day. Neal Baker spotted him on the local news on the night of July 16, 1993, speaking to a WGEM-TV reporter as water rushed through the broken levee into West Quincy behind them, he took notice. He had burned down his elementary school 11 years earlier, and his rap sheet had only grown since then. ![]() James Robert Scott, a lifelong resident of Quincy, Ill., was already quite familiar to local law enforcement by 1993. But in the eyes of others, that man is a scapegoat, and the levee breach in West Quincy, Mo., was just another inevitable consequence of the Great Flood of 1993. In the eyes of the law, the blame rests squarely on a then-23-year-old man with a troubled history. Twenty years ago this week, a levee on the Mississippi River broke.
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