Lessons learned from the great flood of ‘93
The day after Major Paul Nocchiero, of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, was promoted to captain he received another appointment:
He was made operations commander for the police department’s response to the great flood of 1993.
Now secretary to the Board of Police Commissioners (his second tour in the position), he’s following news of troubles to north.
While at the time of this writing things aren’t expected to be bad in the City of St. Louis (although things could get complicated in Metro East), he offers this assessment of the city’s readiness:
St. Louis is well prepared; St. Louis is infinitely better prepared than it was 15 years ago.
How so?
The great flood was a fantastic learning process — and he believes those lessons have stuck.
At the time, the water levels were unprecedented (the River des Peres pictured above). Day to day, nobody could be certain how the rising waters would travel. Public safety officials had daily meetings with topographical maps and made educated guesses about what streets and blocks would be next.
Now we know.
One of the biggest dangers posed by the ‘93 floods was the huge propane tank battery along the river and an explosion hazard to a large swath of South St. Louis.
That risk has been removed.
But the most important lesson Nocchiero points to was the immense talent, quiet heroics and remarkable collaboration that went into the regional response to the great flood.
He says city, state and federal agencies divided up responsibilities with complete cooperation — police, fire, streets, forestry, state emergency response, FEMA. What’s more, they got to know and respect one another as never before and kept up those relationships.
He says big risks to personal safety were part of the daily routine.
He talks about officers guarding evacuated neighborhoods within the propane tanks blast zone. He remembers Parks Director Gary Bess jumping on a bulldozer and driving it into the water to right a listing sand bag bank.
Nocchiero says the lessons have been recorded in emergency response manuals. But, best of all, he says many of those who worked the flood still are in public service — and are ready if called.
Eddie Roth writes about education, social justice, public safety, transportation, legal affairs and historic preservation. He joined the Post-Dispatch editorial page in 2008 after six years as an editorial writer with the Dayton Daily News. But he is not new to St. Louis. Eddie grew up in Webster Groves and south St. Louis County. He's a lawyer who for many years practiced with a downtown firm, and was active in civic affairs, including serving a term on the St. Louis Police Board. He and his wife, Jeanne, and their three daughters, Emily, Julia and Alice, live in the Shaw Neighborhood.
When it comes to community organizing, he endorses Quentin Crisp's advice: Rather than keeping up with the Joneses, it's better to pull them down to your level. 
There are indeed some who make good things happen, and keep bad things from happening, while so many others stand around wringing their hands and saying “Why doesn’t somebody do something?”
His name is long forgotten, but the act isn’t. The Susquehanna River floods in Pennsylvania are hard and frequent, and a tankcar plant stands at river’s edge in the town of Milton. The plant was on vacation years ago when the flood came, but a foreman went in and raised anything of value that he could on crane hoists, and scuttled the tank cars so they couldn’t float out of the shop and downstream, to wreck everything in their path including the bridges. That took brains and guts.