After the Deluge: Health Hazards

By Kevin Fedarko

If hurricanes are Mother Nature's barroom brawlers, swiftly finishing their business and heading for the door, floods tend to behave more like unwanted houseguests: they park themselves in the living room, tear up the furniture, and generally make a nuisance of themselves for weeks or months before finally having the decency to pack up and hit the road. That's not good news for residents of the Mississippi River Valley, who long after floodwaters have crested will play host to a chocolate-colored inland sea sprawling across the spine of the Midwest -- a stagnant, festering stew of industrial waste, agricultural pesticides and raw sewage that laminates buildings in goo and provides a superb growing environment for bacteria. The entire floodplain, says Anita Walker in Des Moines, Iowa, will be a "muddy, stinky, awful mess to clean up."

As the Great Flood of '93 recedes, it is likely to leave in its wake a rash of health problems ranging from disease to chemical pollution. A variety of infections related to sanitation and hygiene, all spread by floodwater, are already giving health officials headaches. Thanks to at least 18 breached sewage plants, microbes have penetrated the nearly 800 miles of piping that keeps the Des Moines area's 250,000 residents supplied with drinking water; it & will take a month to disinfect the system. Tetanus is another concern, especially for sandbaggers and rescuers slogging through the slimy silt and sewage-invested waters. And then there is encephalitis, a viral disease that inflames the spinal cord and brain and can produce a combination of low-grade fever, seizures and even coma. It is transmitted by mosquitoes, whose numbers are expected to explode along the saturated bottomlands in the coming weeks.

So far, there have been no major outbreaks of illness. Health officials say such traditional scourges as cholera and typhoid are unlikely to pose a significant threat, and authorities insist that clean water and uncontaminated food -- which so far have been available in most areas -- will ensure that a full-scale epidemic doesn't take place. "There's a misperception that every time there is a disaster, people are at risk," says Mitchell Cohen of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The key elements are providing safe water and safe food. Health authorities know this controls any infectious-disease problem."

Less predictable, however, are the effects of the farm pesticides and industrial chemicals churning in the silt-encrusted swamps and ponds marooned by subsiding rivers. While hydrologists anticipate that the sheer volume of water will dilute and neutralize any toxicity, no one knows what dangers, if any, are posed by toxic runoff from hundreds of submerged factories, fuel- storage facilities and waste dumps. "Think of all this stuff making a witches' brew of new compounds," says Kevin Coyle, president of American Rivers, an environmental group in Washington. "We have no precedent."

There is, however, plenty of precedent for the nightmare that awaits residents when the waters finally recede. Denizens of the river valley who have endured previous temper tantrums of the Mississippi are all too well acquainted with the thick, claylike layers of earth that will coat the inside of houses, barns and machinery, delaying repairs and driving up the cost of recovery. Farmers have an appropriate term for the stuff: they call it gumbo.

With reporting by Marc Hequet/St. Paul and David Seideman/New York