Flood and Burials

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Flood and Burials

by John H. Sime
The question arises--have floods done damage to cemeteries.? Not here as far as I can recall, as a professional in this field for more than a quarter of a century. It has happened elsewhere--specifically the Missouri and Mississippi Valleys in 1993. These huge rivers spilled out into the flat plains on either side for miles in both directions. Cemeteries five miles or more from the river were inundated, and the result was caskets unearthed, opened, and the contents strewn about by the vandalizing rivers. In some cases, caskets were set afloat, down the rivers, and had to be retrieved sometimes hundreds of miles south. That type of thing has not happened here. Although my father once did have a situation where a vault buried in frozen ground on a of steeply sloped ridge top cemetery emerged from the earth with the spring thaw. But it went no where. The grave had to be re-dug and the vault reset.
Most cemeteries are set far enough away from the rivers that that never poses a problem. LaFarge, Viola, Soldiers Grove, and Gays Mills are valley towns with cemeteries safely ensconced away from the flood plain. Only Readstown is the exception to this. The Readstown cemetery has been flooded any number of times and the last flood --in June of 2008-- was officially the worst flood in Readstown's history (according to the weather bureau in LaCrosse) and that flood saw almost the entirety of the Readstown cemetery under water. Nevertheless, despite this occasional drenching, the cemetery has never been dug into by the river. The graves remained intact. The water simply passed over them. That may not always have been the case--for there is a whole section of the Readstown cemetery which is vacant, like a square with a bite taken out of the south west corner. And this bite lines up perfectly with a sweeping bend to the east made by the original course of the river. Village lore holds that there were once graves there...but...And so nobody ever gets buried there now. A few years ago, Julie Roberts brought a researcher to the cemetery from the University of Wisconsin--LaCrosse, and he ran a ground penetrating device over the mystery bite, but the results were inconclusive.
Dick Wieser, of Wieser Vault Co. in LaCrescent, Minnesota, confirms that there have been no cemeteries in the Kickapoo area victimized by the recent floods. He believes it is a factor of the volume of water, with the Kickapoo in Readstown not having enough capacity to do real damage. He has heard of the flood problems in the west and south in 1993. He adds that while a concrete vault might help prevent such a situation it is not necessarily impossible for a concrete vault to float if it can achieve buoyancy.
After 1993, Batesville Casket Company made a concession to possible flooding of caskets by adding a plastic tube to all their metal caskets--suitable for a small identifying note to be inserted within. This had once been a feature of only their more expensive models.