These damage figures were made up of many factors of which I list a few. Sand bags, we estimate the cost of a sand bag, including the cost of the bag, the drayage and supervision, at an average of $1 apiece, and there were several million of them filled in St. Louis and in the St. Louis area this year.

Jacking up of machinery and equipment to higher levels, maintaining 24-hour pumping of basements and lower floors, moving merchandise to higher floors or to other locations in the city, moving it back after the clean-up job is done, loss of inventory that could not be moved, the hidden damage due to structural weakening when buildings stand in water for weeks, interruption of business during inability to operate or inaccessibility to railroads and truck lines, loss of wages to employees in those plants forced to shut down, all those figures are ominous. We become aware of an even more ominous possibility. To a man who already has 2 feet of water in his building another foot may not concern him too much. But as water seeks its level that extra foot of height spreads laterally over more and more square yardage and inundates more and more properties, depending entirely upon the slope of the terrain. If the slope is sharp the spread is not great; if the slope is gentle the spread obviously is serious. We realized that another 2 to 3 feet would mean that our water plants would be put out of commission, as Mr. Skinker has just told you, and that our two largest reservoirs at Baden and Bissell's Point would be contaminated.

Gentlemen, a city without water means fire, pestilence, and deaths. Our association members are certainly interested most keenly in eliminating these ever-recurring damages from floods, but as citizens of St. Louis we are even more vitally interested in removing the danger of a major disaster that would affect all of our people.

Coming out of this year's flood we estimate that a loss of $10,000,000 has been suffered by industry; fertilizer, steel drums, hardwood lumber, chemicals, food products, to name just a few have floated down the river, and we narrowly escaped much greater loss.

We submit that three factors figured in this escape:

No. 1, the breaking of several levees and dikes between Kansas City and St. Louis;

No. 2, the Mississippi upstream was not high concurrently with the Missouri; and

No. 3, there were no heavy rains during the crest period. Had any one or more of these three factors been unfavorable we would most certainly have had a stage higher than 40.3 feet with the attendant probability of the disaster conditions I have already warned about.

It is horrible to contemplate the great metropolitan city of St. Louis a perennial parade of flood peril. It is more horrible to realize this is true even though there is a ready remedy. The Army engineers tell us they can keep St. Louis safe and dry with a system of pressurized sewers, levees, and concrete sea walls, although the cost of such a program is tremendous the benefits to be derived are even greater.

In 1937 I was in Louisville, Ky., when the Ohio spilled its greatest flood all over that city. It was a major disaster. Immediately thereafter Federal funds were made available and their flood-protection

program is nearing completion today. The same situation prevails at Cincinnati, Ohio; at Fort Smith, Ark.; the State of Mississippi suffered a staggering loss in the 1927 flood, flood protection followed immediately.

In 1950 the same volume of water as was experienced in 1927 rendered no damage at all. In all of these instances and there are others through the country-protection work followed disaster. The barn was locked after the horse was stolen. Can't we be wise in this case and let protection remove the possibility of disaster?

We believe it is important to the national defense and security to keep a great industrial area like ours safe from an interruption in its steady contribution to the Nation's machinery.

Concluding, I respectfully urge you gentlemen to study this problem thoroughly, authorize the project as soon as you possibly can, so that the work can be started with as little delay as possible. Save St. Louis from the perennial peril of flood.

Chairman DAVIS. Thank you. There was a gentleman out there who wanted to be recognized, I am sorry I overlooked you. Give your name, please.

Mr. COATES. May I speak to you all just a minute, Mr. Chairman? Chairman DAVIS. Yes. How long will you require?

STATEMENT OF GORDON COATES, MATSON, MO.

Mr. COATES. Just about 5 minutes, sir. My name is Gordon Coates. I am a farmer from Matson, Mo. I am here with a group of other farmers who are suffering the destruction of their land in the name of navigation.

Now in 1928 our Congress instructed the Army engineers to make the Missouri River navigable, to give Kansas City a river basin point to bring the rail rates down. I can say that these rail rates have never come down, but they have put so many constrictions in that river of dikes that we only have half a river. We have no river. We have a creek, and you can't put a flood down a creek without scouring us out. Now I have got just a few pictures here. I have been wiped out. These men are wiped out. The industrialists have tax deductions, the poor farmers have nothing. They don't even have a dime to take anything off of, but walk out with their clothes on their back because they want to haul freight up and down a river that hasn't a tug going up and down it. They even count the tonnage of the rock they haul down; they count the tonnage of the empty barge going up as navigation. Why, it's the most misleading, deceptive thing. They can't be their own judge and jury of our destruction. We need independent men, hydraulic engineers, to analyze this thing.

They stand here with no plan in mind. They don't even know whether the MVA or the Sloan-Pick plan will work, but, by golly, we farmers know what'll work in this country. Get that kindling wood of theirs out of the river; stop destroying our lands.

Now I'm going to pass this out because I'm not going to take time to read it, but I want you committeemen to read that. The man who wrote this in 1945 predicted everything that would take place on our bottomlands, the most fertile area in the world.

I can remember my grandfather saying, "Get back to the Missouri River Basin, it's the finest in the world." We don't get sediment, we don't get erosion, we get silt.

I went out to my farm yesterday and I have 8 feet of sand over Now you men are going to fly to Kansas City; is that the

100 acres.

plan?

Representative ANGELL. Train.

Mr. COATES. Train. Look out that window, get on the Mo-Pac or get in the air and look out the window to see the sand that's over those bottoms. Then go talk to our farmers, don't talk to these engineers, come out and let oldsters, men 70, 80 years old that know what's taking place.

Representative MAGEE. May I ask you one question? land flooded worse since the erection of the high dams?

Has your Mr. COATES. Since the erection of the piling, yes; we have increased flood heights.

Representative MAGEE. That's what I want to know.

Mr. COATES. All right. There's my farm in 1946. Gentlemen, I want to show you a Government bulletin made by the United States Department of Agriculture, listing Gordon Coates' farm and his adjoining lands as superior land. Look at it today. That's it. Everyone of you, look at it. Call it navigation, call it destruction. Take the piling out of the river. We'll take the floods. We want the silt. Everybody says the bottomland, the river, is coming up. That's an erroneous statement. We are losing our land.

I want to pass these on and I think this committee should hear the farmers. We are the backbone of this Nation. The industrialists have got their tax deductions but us poor farmers haven't. Now we want to work, we want to work with the city of St. Louis, but I want to point out one thing that St. Louis must take cognizance of.

This gentleman that preceded me said that the levees in St. Charles County saved St. Louis. Does he know? I shouldn't question him— pardon the thinking-but there's a levee out there called Gumbo that's pushing the water over on the other side of the small farmer. We are all going to levee against each other until they'll be higher than this city hall, and then we'll flood St. Louis off of the map. They can't hold the water here. Their flood wall won't even be effective.

Now I want to show you the culprit of the Army engineers, in the name of navigation. That's their pile dikes across the river. I have their maps.

Representative MAGEE. May I ask you one more question?
Mr. COATES. Yes, sir; ask me.

Representative MAGEE. Have the high dams benefited anybody except the navigation interests of St. Louis?

Mr. COATES. Well, sir, I'm not a hydraulic engineer. I don't know. I do know we see on our trees-I have been wiped out-Mr. Oberdeck, my good neighbor there, his brothers are all destroyed by this progressing cancer of sand. There's the way my banks are going out, just being eroded because across the river they have dikes that don't even go under the river, under the water at flood time, and I'll let the engineers see it, I'm going to pop in on them in our hearing. There's a photo, right straight across the river from me, I took it the hour, the minute that my farm went under water, and there's the debris, there's my farm under water. There across-I had to take a pair of binoculars because I didn't have a telephoto lens-I took it through a

pair of binoculars, and there's the piling, higher than my bottom, halfway across the river.

Well, gentlemen, we all know one thing. Let's bear it in mind, that when God made that river it made a narrow river, and it made a wide river, the narrow area with the same feet of water going down it went deep to hold its volume of water. But when the river went wide and here are the maps, there it is before the piling, here's what I have got across from me now in the name of navigation to haul their own riprapping down the river.

I defy anybody to sit on that bank and see a barge go up and down that river. We don't see them, they're not there, but they're so hard up for tonnage they count their own up and downstream haul.

Representative ARMSTRONG. I Wonder if the gentleman could tell us what the farmers advocate should be done to correct the situation.

Mr. COATES. I'll tell you, sir, what we want more than anything else is to take the constrictures out of the river; take those dikes out. We'll go back to our ancestors' flood, we'll take the silt, we'll take the things that benefit our soil.

Representative ARMSTRONG. How would you protect the city of St. Louis?

Mr. COATES. All right, sir, I'll tell you how we'll protect the city of St. Louis. You have got a natural flood plain in the Missouri River bottom. Let that flood spread out over that flood plain but don't scour us out because the piling throws the current over our farm and erodes it away.

Representative GEORGE. Do you think impounding this water at its source, all your floods you had this time came from Kansas-do you think if we had the recommended reservoirs constructed there to hold this water it would have relieved your problem?

Mr. COATES. Well, sir, I'm going to answer you and I want to give you all some food for thought.

I have traveled Kansas; I have traveled Missouri and Nebraska. I know the Plains area out there. This is a rough figure: 24 hours a day approximately 6 miles of water passed my farm. That made a total of 5,000-no; in 35 days that the flood was above flood crest, that made a total of 5,040 lineal miles, lineal miles of water going by. The river is 5 miles wide. That is 25,200 miles, square miles of water that went by my farm during that crest of this flood.

Kansas has 85,000 square miles. One-fourth of the flood in Kansas went to Oklahoma and Arkansas. That's where it went. Threefourths of it, we'll say, would be in Kansas. Now that water must have averaged around 15 feet deep in front of my farm. So put Kansas under water, 25,200 miles, and take off the fourth, is Kansas going under water to save Missouri? No, they are not. Neither is Missouri going under water to save Kansas. Why, they'll have court injunctions against those dams and the taxing power of that area until those dams won't be built until my great-grandchildren are grown, and then I doubt it. You can't put Nebraska under water. But take those constrictures out; that's all we ask.

Chairman DAVIS. Let me ask you then, What is your answer to the problem?

Mr. COATES. What is my answer?

Chairman DAVIS. In a word, what is your answer?

Mr. COATES. First, repeal the Navigation Act of 1928. Take that off the books. Then instruct the Army engineers to take and go out and pull that piling out of the river and then put it along the cutting bank to keep it from eroding; just give us bank control. Let us take the floods; they are worth a thousand dollars in fertilizer. We can't stop it all up in Montana, but what has happened, the river comes out of its banks and with such velocity it scours us out, sir, and here are the pictures. I have lost here a tremendous-I measured it, the Army engineers were out there the other day taking a contour map. I don't know what they are thinking about because they didn't have one before. Here's the erosion 48 inches from this tree. I go out to the root lines, I come across and put a level and a board. Fortyeight inches of my ground is gone, 12 inches of sand before this last flood.

Now, sir, your farmers, you can't operate equipment in that kind of a terrain; why, the cost is exorbitant. My farm's abandoned. Now I would like to make one request, to take navigation out, stabilize the banks, go out and see the farmers, talk to the oldsters, quit letting the Army engineers be the judge and jury of their own misdeeds. Then get some independent advice if you can find a hydraulic engineer that isn't on their payroll.

Representative MAGEE. Let's get this straight. You talked about your grandfather. Tell me this: Is your farm, your land flooding worse today after the Army engineers have done their job than it flooded in your grandfather's time? That's what I want to know. Mr. COATES. Yes, sir, yes, sir.

Representative MAGEE. It's flooding worse?

Mr. COATES. Yes, sir.

Representative MAGEE. That's what I want to know. I want that in the record.

Mr. COATES. 1941, 1942, 1943, 1945, 1947, and this disaster; it's worse. yes, sir.

Representative SMITH. I represent a district that lies for 250 miles along the banks of the Mississippi River. We have along that bank rich farm land which once was subjected to annual overflow of the various types of overflow of the type that has visited your farm. I have seen all of that type of destruction myself on the Mississippi River, and along the Mississippi River the flood-control program there has included a bank-stabilization program which has protected all of the lands within the area of the levees along the line of the Mississippi, on both sides. Don't you think that an adequate program with a bank-stabilization system in it designed to protect the lands would be of some benefit to the farmers in your area, and don't you think that an over-all type of flood-control program will enable you to take advantage of the navigation features of the river such as we have done and at the same time protect the farm land down there? Perhaps you just haven't seen enough of what should be done. Mr. COATES. All right, sir, I'll answer your questions, one, two, and three.

Chairman DAVIS. You asked for 5 minutes; we have given you 20. Mr. COATES. All right.