Top 10 Historic U.S. Floods

Here is the list of the Top 10 Historic U.S. Floods According to a Flooding Expert with the U.S. Geological Survey "Robert Holmes"

Mississippi River, 1927

Date: April-May 1927

Significance: Most destructive river flood in the history of the U.S.; 500 killed; 600,000 homeless

Holmes says: The sheer landmass involved in this flood makes it incredibly noteworthy. Across Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, some 16 million acres of land (26,000 square miles) were inundated with water from the mighty Mississippi. At Vicksburg, Mississippi, alone, the river was 80 miles wide. This flood shifted the influence of flood policy in the U.S., which is still impacting us today. Everything — our levee policies, the way we engineer all of these things — was built out of what people learned from the 1927 flood.

Ohio River, 1937

Date: January-February 1937

Significance: The flood of record for the Ohio River; $20 million in damages

Holmes says: The flooding was so widespread, people were left homeless some 30 miles away from the river. This impacted people for months — you had families moving in with other families for weeks on end. I grew up in southern Illinois and remember hearing about this flood as a kid. My grandmother went through it and, though she lived 20 miles away from the river, she had neighbors who had lost their homes staying with her.

Mississippi River, 1993

Date: May-October 1993

Significance: With more than $15 billion in damages, the flood was the second costliest on record; 50 flood-related deaths

Holmes says: In St. Louis, Missouri, the waters stayed at flood stage for 81 consecutive days. This is the flood that came and stayed forever. That's the thing that sticks in my mind — that it lasted such a long time. I was young in my career at that point — I had been working as a hydrologist for only seven or eight years. I was out working on that flood for what seemed like forever.

Hurricane Katrina, 2005

Date: August-September 2005

Significance: With an estimated $81 billion in damages, Hurricane Katrina was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history; more than 1,800 died; 15 million people were impacted, economically or otherwise

Holmes says: Eighty percent of New Orleans was underwater and they are still feeling the impact today. The population of New Orleans has not rebounded. This hurricane, and the subsequent flooding, forever changed the city.

Big Thompson Canyon, Colorado, 1976

Date: July 31, 1976

Significance: $35.5 million in damages; 144 dead

Holmes says: Flash floods are incredibly devastating. Scientifically, they are quite interesting. You have a tremendous amount of water that comes in a very short amount of time. Anytime you get in these mountainous areas, you have a potential for a flash flood. This case sticks in my mind because of the intensity of the [water] as it rushed from the Rocky Mountains into Big Thompson Canyon in Colorado. The rain started in the evening of July 31 and by the wee hours of August 1, you had 12 inches of rain in this narrow canyon. The water speeds were very high and people were just washed away. They didn't have an escape; it all happened very fast.

Rapid City, S.D., 1972

Date: June 9-10, 1972

Significance: $165 million in damages; 238 dead

Holmes says: This was another flash-flood scenario. The moisture rose up out of the plains and poured down on Rapid City, near the Black Hills of South Dakota. Flash floods are especially dangerous when, like this one, they happen at night. That's when they kill a lot of people. People are woken from their sleep, they are disoriented, they get turned around and often don't realize they are in a lot of water until it is too late.

Galveston, Texas, 1900

Date: Sept. 8, 1900

Significance: 8,000 dead

Holmes says: This flood is significant because of the sheer magnitude of people who perished. This was a storm-surge situation in the wake of a hurricane. You had a Category 4 hurricane with an estimated 135-miles-per-hour wind hurling water on Galveston and literally drowning the people there.

Johnstown, Pa., 1889

Date: May 31, 1889

Significance: More than 2,200 dead

Holmes says: Engineers are called on all the time to analyze what would happen if a dam burst — where would all the water go, how fast would it get there and so on. In this case, the South Fork Dam failed, unleashing 20 million tons of water on Johnstown, located just 14 miles from the dam. Less than an hour after the dam burst, a wall of water some 30 feet high smashed into the town at speeds of 20 to 40 miles per hour. There is a fascinating book on the disaster, written by historian David McCullough, and the flood is also the subject of Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm."

Central Valley, California, 1861-62

Date: December 1861-January 1862

Significance: Known as the storm that caused California to go bankrupt

Holmes says: These storms, also called Pineapple Express, are atmospheric rivers, where moisture from the Pacific is very efficiently pumped in over the West Coast. In this case, a tremendous amount of rain was dumped on an area of California's Central Valley that measured 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. This flood literally bankrupted the state because they were very dependent on property taxes and one-fourth of the state's taxable real estate was destroyed. It was an economic catastrophe. They even moved the capital out of Sacramento for a while. We estimate a similar storm of that magnitude in California today would cause $725 billion in damages.

Hurricane Camille, 1969

Date: August 1969

Significance: $1.4 billion in damages nationwide

Holmes says: Hurricane Camille made landfall in the Gulf, but Virginia was hit hardest. As Camille moved from the Gulf inland over the Appalachians, she unleashed a series of flash floods before entering the Atlantic on August 20. In Virginia alone, the storms swept away more than 100 bridges and left only one highway intact. The James River in central Virginia, as the meeting point of several tributaries, experienced severe flooding that devastated the nearby community of Richmond. Camille changed the way people thought about a hurricane's potential to affect inland communities and led to the passage of the Disaster Relief Act of 1969.

Source & Read More: Time