Missouri's Great Flood of 1993 by Kenneth Kieser  Hardback

As discussed on the KKFI Program Anything Goes by publisher Michael Bushnell

Missouri's Great Flood of 1993 is a twenty-year retrospective of the 1993 flood that inundated the Missouri River Valley for weeks during the summer of 1993 from award winning outdoors writer Kenneth Kieser and The Northeast News.

Through Kenneth's up close and personal experiences during the flood combined with personal interviews with those who survived the flood, Kieser weaves a compelling and introspective view in to what was called "Missouri's 500 year flood."

From where the Missouri River crosses the Iowa-Missouri state line in Northwest Missouri to its confluence with the Mississippi River near St. Charles, MO, Missouri's Great Flood of 1993 is packed full of photographs from Kieser's personal collection as well as photographs from the Missouri Department of Transportation, the United States Geological Survey and a variety of other sources re-telling the story that gripped a nine state area in the mid-west during the summer of 1993.

Kieser grew up in the Missouri River Basin area, and was working as a journalist when the waters began to rise.  He was a on the Board of Directors for the Outdoor Writers Association of America when a conservation group in Washington, D.C. asked him to photograph the damage for Congress.

“I was raised throughout the Missouri River Basin…and I always had a passion for it.  So it was kind of a natural for me to do the photos, and do the work, and write the book,” said Kieser.

He kept the prints, and they held their integrity for 20 years.  He calls his role as a photographer a labor of love. “The hard part about it was seeing places I loved and had been around all my life flooded.  We would float up in a boat to these places, and just absolutely everybody in the boat would be silent because , well, it was like at a graveyard.  Or looking at a grave of someone you loved,” said Kieser, “It was a very sad and very, very tough experience. So writing this book, of course to me, is saving a history.”

Missouri’s Great Flood of 1993 contains stories from around the area, including a chapter on the Hardin Cemetery disaster.  ”We have a lot of people here who did a lot of extraordinary things to rescue vaults, caskets, and bodies that were literally sucked out of the ground.  And my book is full of heroism and things people did that really, really showed the best of American spirit,” said Kieser