Floods create economic catastrophe in Midwest

Long after the waters subside, the floods that submerged the Midwest this month could turn out to be the region’s biggest economic disaster in decades, with ramifications that will be felt by consumers across the country.

With levees still under pressure and more flooding expected, no one is ready to put an estimate on the final damage, but it will likely swamp the $21 billion in losses tallied by the Great Flood of 1993.

Crop damage in Iowa alone has already surpassed $2.7 billion, nearly half of it in just one town, Cedar Rapids. Corn prices hit an all-time high near $8 a bushel Monday on the Chicago Board of Trade, but many other important crops were also devastated, especially wheat in Missouri and Nebraska and soybeans in Indiana and Kentucky.

Like thousands of other farmers in the region, Mitchel McLane, whose corn fields are just two miles from the Mississippi River in Union County, Ill., won’t get to benefit from the record prices such crops are fetching. Those premium prices will go to producers in other, drier parts of the country.

So much water is seeping up from the ground on his farm that “you can’t even hardly walk on it, let alone [get] a tractor or anything else on it,” McLane said.

McLane said his fields would probably remain waterlogged into August. But “even if the river goes down soon, there’s going to be at least half that we probably won’t get a crop on at all this year,” he said.

Jerry Bradly, a fifth-generation farmer in Sun Prairie, Wis., expected to lose at least 20 percent of his soybean harvest.

“That is pretty typical of every field we have,” Bradly said.

Growing season already lost
Casey Langan, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Farm Bureau, said Bradly faced the same problem farmers across the Midwest face: Because it’s already June, it’s too late to replant.

An msnbc.com-NBC News special report The following NBC affiliates contributed to this report: KARE of Minneapolis; KOMU of Columbia, Mo.; KSDK of St. Louis; KYTV of Springfield, Mo.; WEAU of Eau Claire, Wis.; WGBA of Green Bay, Wis.; WISE of Fort Wayne, Ind.; WMTV of Madison, Wis.; WPSD of Paducah, Ky.; WTHR of Indianapolis; and WTMJ of Milwaukee.

“You need about 110 to 120 growing days to get your crop to harvest, and there are not that many days left in the season before a frost. What you see now is lost is lost” for good, Langan said.

The story is the same in Indiana, where State Agriculture Director Andy Miller said the floods were the greatest economic catastrophe in the state’s history.

“We have roughly 9 percent of the state’s crops that is flooded, both corn and beans,” Miller said.

It’s not just the billions of dollars in lost crops. Some fields will take months or even years to recover from built-up debris or silt; others were eroded by the rushing floodwaters.

“Livestock was affected. Farmhouses were affected,” Miller said. “Machinery was affected, and the land was affected.”

But farms aren’t the only businesses ravaged by the rushing waters. Thousands of businesses and storefronts from Minnesota to Arkansas were inundated. Some of them won’t be able to recover.

“I can’t honestly take any more,” said Helen Anderson, owner of Andy’s Pub in Oshkosh, Wis., where the basement swamped to its ceiling and the main bar was left under 10 inches of water.

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