ABSTRACT
No previous natural disaster in the nation's history has caused more damage to the railroad industry, the barge industry, and to all other forms of surface transportation than the floods of 1993. A series of themes about the flood of 1993 emerges after assessing the impacts and responses to the flood in the transportation sector. The nation's major east-west railroads and highways converge in the three hubs, cross all of these rivers, and the Upper Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers are heavily used waterways in the nation's inland commercial navigation system. During the flood, shippers who rely on barges turned to the railroads, to trucks, or both to maintain delivery of either raw materials or processed products. The devotion and heroism of thousands of individual employees of the railroads are evident in their outstanding efforts to quickly rebuild and to maintain a semblance of normal operations.
