affic was halted for two months; carriers lost about $1 million per day. Some power plants along the river saw their coal stocks diminish from a two-month supply to enough to last for 20 days.Hundreds of miles of roads built on the flat, wide floodplain was closed. Flooding is estimated to have cost $500 million in road damage.All in all, the flood resulted in damages worth over $10 billion plus $6.5 billion in crops. More importantly the flood cost the lives of 45 people, destroyed over 50, 000 homes and 75, 000 were evacuated.People were either left homeless or were forced to leave their homes due to the risks of the flood. Half the counties in the nine states were declared federal disaster areas. This is the first step in becoming eligible for federal aid, including direct grants from Congress, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and many other groups. The first steps taken after the flooding was to rebuild everything that had been destroyed and then to attempt to prevent the flood from ever repeating itself. There are two major ways that engineers have attempted to control the flow of rivers in the Mississippi basin:1. Build levees or floodwalls to contain rising stream levels2. Build reservoirs on tributary streams to store floodwaters for later release.However, over 9,300 km of levees were damaged following the 1993 flood. St. Louis was protected by a massive floodwall. The wall developed a leak but held up over the length of the flood.Only 10% of Midwest residents who lived in flood-prone areas had flood insurance prior to the flood. Over eleven million buildings are located in flood prone areas but only 19% purchased flood insurance (“People are stupid”).The United States is an EMDC and hence can afford the costs of the damage. Evacuation can easily be completed because of the more luxurious resources available in an EMDC. There were special aid groups that were working non-stop to prevent the flooding, funded...
