Causing a Catastrophe Written and Produced by Niki Budnick
When the West Quincy Levee failed during catastrophic floods 25 years ago, police pegged James Robert Scott as the cause.
July 16, 1993 was a hot, muggy day in the industrial town of West Quincy, Missouri. It was the day a levee on the Mississippi River broke, drowning fourteen thousand acres of farmland in the Fabius River Drainage District in feet of water and destroying the few businesses operating there. The force of the levee failure sent a barge crashing into a gas station, causing the station to explode into flames. The smoke could be seen for miles. The town was consumed by water. The Quincy Bayview Bridge was shut down. People were stranded on either side of the river.
For months leading up to the levee failure hundreds of residents and volunteers joined the Fabius River Water District and members of the Army Corps of Engineers in sandbagging the West Quincy levee, located across the river from the working class city of Quincy, Illinois.
The winter, spring and summer of 1993 had seen significantly more precipitation than usual. Quincy saw more than 15 inches of rain in June and July alone, equivalent to 40% of their yearly average precipitation. Sixteen out of 31 days in July had measurable rainfall, putting the Mississippi River 15 feet over flood stage in Quincy.
Ayerco gas station is photographed in flames. Courtesy: Quincy Herald-Whig The flood in West Quincy was a minuscule part of what would later be known as the Great Flood of ‘93, one of the worst in Midwest history. It was a 500-year flood that killed more than 30 people, destroyed around 100,000 homes and flooded approximately 15 million acres of farmland.
Aerial view of the Quincy Bayview Bridge. Courtesy: National Weather Service Yet, for those thousands of acres of farmland in West Quincy, the impacts from the Great Flood of ‘93 were not, according to police, an entirely natural disaster. For law enforcement the blame for the flood belonged to one man.
Preventing the Inevitable
Norman Haerr, a farmer from Taylor, Missouri, was president of Fabius River Drainage District in 1993. His farm was part of those 14,000 acres of land that flooded. Haerr recalled how vicious and terrifying the weather was as he and his crew worked to secure the West Quincy levee. He told weather.com, “I remember we had lightning and thunder so hard they just laid down on the side of the levee hoping not to be struck by lightning.”
The Haerr Farm was flooded when the West Quincy levee broke on July 16th, 1993. Courtesy: Norman Haerr
With the rain as relentless as it was that summer, Haerr, along with many of the other farmers in the community, prepared for the flood and didn’t harvest their crops that season. Still, Haerr felt confident in the strength of the levee, saying “The river fell enough that we were feeling pretty comfortable that we were going to hold it out.”
Haerr wasn’t the only member of the Quincy, Illinois, community that pitched in to protect the Quincy Bayview Bridge and the levee. Chuck Scholz, the mayor of Quincy from 1993 until 2005, remembers the sheer volume of people working on the levee. He described the sandbagging effort as “a wonderful, unified, intense effort to keep that levee up and protect the bridge.”
Volunteers form a sandbag brigade outside the former Sky Ride Inn on Front Street in Quincy, Ill. Courtesy: Quincy Herald-Whig But despite that effort, the levee failed.
A Suspect
The night the levee failed, two Quincy police officers, Neal and Bruce Baker, were, like the rest of the community, disappointed. “They thought they had everything under control so I was a little surprised when it broke to be honest with you,” Bruce told weather.com. Bruce had been spent much of his free time sandbagging. Later he would witness the gas station explosion first hand. Maybe it was his familiarity with the situation that caused him to notice something strange when he flipped on the 10 pm WGEM news broadcast that evening. Neal called his brother Bruce immediately. “I said, ‘Are you seeing this?’”
The Bakers had simultaneously noticed a familiar, seemingly nervous 23-year-old James Robert Scott speaking with reporter Michelle McCormick. Scott appeared jittery during his interview with the reporter, shifting his feet and averting his eyes. He told McCormick he was trying to help sandbag and happened to witness the levee break.
23-year-old James Scott speaking with reporter Michelle McCormick after the levee broke. Courtesy: WGEM
“Who’s the first one on the scene but Jimmy Scott. The first one to see it break, Jimmy Scott. What the heck’s he doing over there? So there’s questions that need to be answered,” Neal Baker told weather.com, recalling his reaction. Scott was alone and he wasn’t wearing one of the orange vests that others working on the levee were wearing. He also looked too clean to have been doing hard work on the levee. He looked shifty, like he was lying.
But the main reason the police officer brothers were paying close attention to that interview: Jimmy Scott was a criminal.
Who is James Robert Scott?
At just 12 years old James Scott was convicted of burning down an elementary school in Quincy. After that, a slew of other arrests would have him incarcerated six different times before he turned 23. Scott was a suspect in several crimes in Quincy in the late 80s and 90s, from arsons to burglaries to passing bad checks. Every cop in town knew his name.
“I didn’t think of the consequences,” Scott told weather.com regarding his arson convictions. “It was just the spark of a lighter, or the strike of a match.”
By July 1993 Scott had been out of prison for two years. He was married and holding down a job. Still, he admits to partying.“It was a pretty wild time,” he says, “I liked going down to the creek or going down to the river, people’s houses and drink or whatever.”
So what was James Scott doing on the levee that night in July? He claims he was trying to help out. Scott said he noticed a, “depressed area,” or what could have been a boil in the river.
Boils are a common sight in rivers that are about to flood. They happen when a large amount of water is forced into one location, creating what looks like a swirling tornado in the water. The Army Corps of Engineers had instructed volunteers to drop sandbags anywhere they saw a boil.
James Scott says he moved a few sandbags, “to a depressed area.” But no one saw Scott move those sandbags that night.
Arrested
The Bakers arrested James Scott on October 1, but not, initially, for the levee breach. Scott was a suspect in at least three other crimes committed in Quincy since the levee had failed. He was wanted for allegedly stealing a car, snatching a woman’s purse and writing bad checks.
According to the Bakers, it was during those interviews that Scott confessed to breaking the levee intentionally. “There were five things we wanted to talk about. Three of them he admitted, two of them he didn’t. The three (crimes) he admitted to, he did, including breaking the levee,” Neal told weather.com. Scott says he told the police exactly what happened on the levee that night. Whatever happened after he moved the sandbags “was not my intention,” he said. Neal Baker didn’t believe him. “In my opinion,” Neal said, “in his heart he’s an arsonist. And in my opinion, half of him wanted to beat his chest and say, ‘Look what I’ve done,’ because it was catastrophic. It was huge. And he knew how much trouble he was in.”
The Trial Begins
Scott was charged with knowingly causing a catastrophe in November 1994. It’s an obscure law on the books in Missouri, and no one in the United States had ever been convicted of the crime.
The State of Missouri outlines the law: “A person commits the offense of causing catastrophe if he or she knowingly causes a catastrophe by explosion, fire, flood, collapse of a building, release of poison, radioactive material, bacteria, virus or other dangerous and difficult to confine force or substance.” Catastrophe, in this legal context, is defined as causing death or serious physical injury to ten or more people, or substantial damage to five or more buildings, structures or vital public facilities. It carries a potential life sentence.
View an interactive map of essential locations brought up during the James Robert Scott trial:
www.google.com/maps/d/u/0...466718%2C-91.4432519&z=13
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Poster Comment:
This dummy got caught and is now in the slammer.