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When the floods that devastated the upper Mississippi River in 1993 receded, they left behind more than just muddy debris. They also left behind the seed of an idea that Bob Brakenridge hoped could help prevent similarly unexpected disasters in the future.
The July 1993 flood — the most destructive in U.S. history — affected nine states, especially Iowa, Missouri and the Dakotas. Floodwaters submerged seventeen thousand square miles of land, killing nearly fifty people and causing the evacuation of twenty-six thousand more. More than four hundred counties were declared disaster areas. Meteorologists described the flood as a once-in-a-century event, while homeowners and policymakers wondered why no one had predicted the possibility of such a calamity.
“The water was so high, you might only see the tops of grain silos sticking up here and there and maybe the roof of one of the taller buildings,” says Brakenridge, who visited the soggy region that summer with the aid of a special grant from the National Geographic Society. From a small plane nine hundred feet above the Mississippi, he toured the destruction from Wisconsin to St. Louis. “Even from up in the air, you could look out almost to the horizon and there was nothing but water.”
Brakenridge’s aerial tour of the region was more than just sightseeing. As a fluvial geomorphologist, he was interested in the potential of new radar satellites, which rely on reflected microwaves rather than visible light, to capture an image, to create the first truly accurate maps of large-scale flooding. Previous attempts to map floods were limited because optical satellites could not see through clouds; the newer radar satellites, however, could. And so, up in the single-engine plane, Brakenridge compared the actual flooding below him to images taken by radar satellites.
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