(gentle music) (film whirring) (boat engine roaring) (people chattering) - [Observer] Okay.

- [Observer] Aint nothing I can do about it.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Stretching across nine states, and covering around 400,000 square miles, the Great Flood of 1993 would become the most devastating flood in modern US history, destroying around 50,000 homes, and completely overwhelming at least 75 entire towns.

The estimated damage was between 15 and $20 billion.

Tragically, dozens lost their lives.

(gentle music) (plane engine roaring) On July 13th, rising waters broke through the levees around Hardin Cemetery in Hardin, Missouri, a small community around 40 miles outside of Kansas City.

The water carved a 70-foot hole across the cemetery, unearthing over 700 graves.

The recovery that followed would be a defining moment for everyone involved.

- Governor Carnahan and his staff were touring the area of flood, and they happened to notice that the water began to cut the levy at the edge of the cemetery as it was rising.

So he made phone calls to those of us that needed to know.

- The presiding commissioner called me and asked me if I could help in retrieving some caskets.

That said they had a few caskets out.

And I thought at the time, you know, how heavy could a casket be?

Dean was our coroner at the time.

And so Dean was kind of running the situation.

And Dean and I went down and surveyed, and I realized real quick that this was not just a few caskets, this was full-blown disaster.

- When you're the coordinator, or you're leading an effort, you will never satisfy everyone.

You will always have your critics, you're gonna have your critics.

I've had mine.

I went up there and I worked for the coroner.

The coroner was the boss.

Dean Snow was the boss, period.

We had each other's backs, if you understand what I'm saying.

And this is true, no matter what you're doing, you're gonna catch flack from somebody.

People that worked in the mud and and stumped around, and actually wore themselves out, guys and ladies that were used to be in an air-conditioned room, out in that hot sun and mud, their goal was helping families and a community recover from this.

And so I don't have much time for those naysayers at all.

- You know, a lot of people didn't have long distances to come in and drive, but you know, like I said- - [Narrator] The team was surrounded by media from the beginning, part disaster story and part macabre fairytale.

It was easy to sensationalize.

Some of them chose to focus on death, telling stories that concentrated on sifting bones and identifying skulls.

But for the people doing the job, it was just as much about the living as it was the dead.

- Somebody had come up with some funds.

They wanted the actual headstones retrieved out of the cemetery, that could be retrieved, because it would save people buying a new headstone for their loved one.

You know, that can get pretty expensive.

I remember for at least a week, maybe two, we spent right there in the cemetery retrieving these headstones.

And it was just really grueling work.

It was like walking in the bottom of a pond.

I mean, there was about three foot of mud.

Basically, I spent that week or a week and a half crawling on my hands and knees, 'cause you couldn't walk in it, because your feet would get stuck in the mud.

- I recall that it was a mile from a railroad crossing over to 10 Highway.

And that was the only road, it was a gravel road, it was the only road in there, because 10 Highway was washed out a hole about 20 feet deep.

When we took the crane in on the first day, I walked in front of it with a long pole, and well, I didn't know if we even had a road bed.

And so I was feeling to make sure that the road was there.

And the water, a lot of times the wind would be blowing, the water would start making it lose your equilibrium.

And so you would start to go with the waves a little bit.

And then you had to feel it in the steering wheel.

And just when the truck started to pull, you'd come back to the hard surface.

But at a minimum, for the number we hauled outta there, that was 200 trips.

- You just did what you had to first each day when you got up.

(chuckles) So you just rolled up your sleeves and did what you needed to.

I don't know, one thing wasn't any harder than the other.

You just had a bunch of things you had to deal with, the reissuing graves, lots, and all that kinda stuff, and getting hold of families, and seeing what they needed to do.

And it's just time consuming, and paperwork, and stuff that you had to do.

I don't know that anything was any harder than the other chores.

So just a bunch of chores that needed to be done.

- But your dedicated workers, which comprised 98% of the people that showed up, were there, and I believe everybody felt like they were on a mission.

I truly do.

There was something in the air that was, for lack of a better term, the urgency of the hour, but something magical.

It was like they were on an honorable mission.

- A very good friend of mine, Ed and Linda Wolf, had one child, and it died as a baby, and it was one of them that was missing.

And Ed come to me and he said that their son was missing.

And he said, "Please keep an eye out.

Try to locate it."

One day on this mile stretch that I was talking about, where from the railroad over to 10 Highway that we had to go back and forth, the water kept going down and down.

And one day going in there, I looked over in the drainage ditch there, and I thought I saw the top of a vault.

This friend of mine was helping me, Jim McBee.

And I put a strap on the end of the cable and swung him over there, because the water in the drainage ditch was probably 8 to 10 foot deep, and let him down.

And he tipped the vault, and he said, "Yeah, it's a baby vault."

And I just had the feeling that, you know, that was Ed and Linda's boy.

So anyway, we recovered it, and it was.

That really made me feel good.

(organizers chattering) - [Narrator] The initial recovery was only part of the job.

The team would strive to identify each and every person, but that would prove to be impossible.

Remains were often separated from their caskets.

There wasn't always a guaranteed match against the cemetery's records, but that didn't mean they deserved any less respect.

They came to be called simply the Unknowns.

Coroner Dean Snow and his team came up with a precise plan for reburial, in case identification was ever possible in the future.

But the plan required even more land to be added to the cemetery.

- We couldn't relocate, 'cause it's too expensive.

Half of the cemetery was, to the left, intact, but half of it, in the center of it, that half was washed away.

So the bodies that we found and recovered, we had to have a place to put them.

So we ended up, after it all settled down, we kind of knew where the lake would be.

So we built the cemetery around the lake to make it look nice.

The local farmer that had owned the cornfield there, at the cemetery, we bought enough, well, we bought five acres to add to the cemetery.

So we had enough space to rebury the knowns and unknowns.

400 and 500 bodies that we called the Unknown because we couldn't identify those bodies.

- When we got that vault area, you know, grave, whatever you wanna call it, it was just a giant hole.

But we got down in there with a tripod and level and garden rakes, and made sure that it was perfectly level, and that every bit of it was smoothed out.

And then when I placed those vaults in there, they had to be within 1/4 inch, north-south and east-west, of perfect.

Now, when you're dealing with something that weighs 5,000 pounds, and getting it within 1/4 inch, either way, and again, this was Dean Snow and Vernie Fountain, they had charted this out, and each one of those vaults had a number on it.

And that number went back to their work that they had done with the person in that vault.

So all the information went back to that number.

And that number was set aside for a slot in that mass grave.

And so it had to be exact, so that if they ever came up with information on that person, they could go back and exhume them, and they would be precise.

- To the end of this, in a (Kevin sighs) truckload of small vaults... Ah.

Sorry.

Yeah, a truckload of small vaults come in, and it was children and babies.

(Kevin sighs) And you could hear a pin drop.

Not one person said a word while we set those vaults.

It had meant a lot to put those children at rest.

- And this one reporter with one of the newspapers in Kansas City started drilling me.

Most everybody was asking really legitimate questions, and I was trying to give him an answer.

But this guy was talking about bones, and talking about it was basically, I took it, that he was trying to degrade and make this a spooky, awful thing, these bones and coffins, he kept calling them, and I, you know, corrected him about the coffins.

And I said, "These are caskets.

That's an old term.

These are caskets, and these are human beings," you know, so on and so forth.

And I got pretty angry at him.

(machine whirring) - [Narrator] Hardin was only one of many communities impacted by the Great Flood of '93.

Like so many others, they needed help.

The destruction of most of the cemetery created a challenge that was too big for a single town to handle alone.

Volunteers and donations came from all over, along with a specialized federal team, the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, or DMORT.

These were highly-specialized groups that included forensic identification specialists, medical examiners, coroners, dental experts, radiologists, safety experts, fingerprint specialists, and more.

- A federal team came in that had just formed in 1990.

So this was their first outing.

And that team was DMORT.

And I got to meet a lot of people, through working at Hardin, that I would get to know very well in the future, and still have some friends that were at Hardin on that very first team.

That really was quite a deal for us to be involved in the very beginning of something of the magnitude of DMORT.

- Dad and I were asked to be on the DMORT team, which we thought was an amazing honor.

And these guys today, I guarantee you if I saw any of them, it would be like no time had passed.

We are definitely blood brothers for sure.

We went to New York for 9/11.

I was at Ground Zero for about two months.

And let me tell you, that's a life-changing experience.

I don't think I've ever, hmm, I've never seen a city as a whole mourn, like I did in New York.

That was really something to see.

- I did have one thing that happened that just really shook me.

A friend of mine and I had been working at Ground Zero, and we came in, we had ashes and dust all over our uniforms, and we were staying in a hotel.

And this hotel was, oh, I don't know, on a different floor they had a thing going for the Miss New York contest.

And when we got on the elevator to go up to our room, there was three young ladies come on, and they're dressed to the nines, with formals and everything.

And this one girl said, "What are you two doing?"

And my buddy said, "Well, we just, you know, we're doing recoveries down at Ground Zero."

She lost all expression, and she dropped down and kissed our feet.

I can't tell you what that means.

(wind rushing) - [Narrator] The Hardin recovery took months, and thousands of hours of labor.

Thousands of hours spent knee-deep in mud, or pushing through neck-deep water to secure a floating casket.

The flood changed the lives of everyone it touched, but not everything was destruction and loss.

The team would learn the true character of the people they worked alongside of.

Connections were made, and doors were opened to forge bonds that would last a lifetime.

- One person brought in a film crew from their state, and the thing that really upset me the most is that that episode that showed on television in his hometown led you to believe that that group was the savers of this operation.

And there were hundreds, there were hundreds of other people that made that operation successful.

- People need to realize that it took many hours, and it was spread out over a long period of time for this particular flood, because it was way up, almost winter time, before all the water had drained away.

So it was a five- or six-month period of time before you even had dry, the low holes had dried up enough that you could do anything.

- I grew up working with my father, and so it was everyday business for us, you know.

Now this was probably the biggest job we'd ever done together, you know, and both of us being accepted on the DMORT team I think helped dad and I, it gave us, as a father and son, something else that we'd... Well, we were both in the Air Force, of course, we were both part of this business, and now we were both able to go on DMORT missions, and do that together with people that we'd bonded with.

So my father and I have a pretty special relationship.

We've got to do some amazing things together that most father and sons never get to experience.

- Some of those people I've known since '93.

They're family, and they really are.

They'll come to your son's wedding, they'll, you know, it's just like an extended family.

And we call each other brothers and sisters.

And you don't mess with my brothers and sisters.

You know, and that's, it's a close-knit group.

And the thing that I have that has really amazed me is that they took me in.

- Well, I'll go to my grave, having a soft spot in my heart for Darrell, in the way he worked with us, and so on.

I'll have a soft spot in my heart for those people that showed up and worked.

Now there's some of them that I'd say they didn't do a very good job, but they took their time and came up and helped, and offered their talents for what they could do.

- These are friendships that have lasted a lifetime.

Dean Snow's passed on now, which Dean was like an uncle to me.

Bernie Fountain, amazing man.

Just someone I have so much respect for.

I mean, the service he's given to this country is unrepayable.

Everybody that I worked with that summer I have a history with now, because I've done so many things with them since the '93 flood.

You know, I became a part of DMORT.

I went on missions with them.

I got to be around all these people at a very young age, and they were all quite a bit older than I was.

So I feel like they helped shape who I am as a person, because these people are, they're people I look up to.

- Death is not a joke to the family or the person that's dying.

It ain't a joke.

We can make jokes about death.

That's the way we deal with death.

But it's not for me to make a joke about your death or your death.

Not for me to do that.

If I wanna make a joke about my death, which I do, that's my business.

But for God's sake, don't do it for somebody else.

It's respect and dignity, and all of that, that has to go into handling the dead.

And I'm very sensitive about that, because so many people looked at it as it was just a cemetery.

Just a cemetery.

It's hollowed ground.

- I think there was a lot of healing brought about from the '93 flood, because as upset as people were about this tragedy happening to the cemetery, so many people got to reclaim their loved ones, and really have a, like a second closure, a reuniting with their loved one, just because they got to do, they got to dig up old pictures, they got to talk to family about, "Hey, did you know what grandma did with this?"

Or, you know, or, "Where grandpa would've kept this?"

Just looking for anything to help identify or... And it brought families closer together.

It really helped this community to heal from the destruction that happened.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] The great flood of 1993 brought suffering and hardship to millions.

For the people of Hardin, it brought a national spotlight, a chance to see hundreds come together, many of them strangers, to serve a community in need.

It was a chance to form bonds, a friendship that would stand the test of time.

And ultimately, they were able to show the world that disaster in human loss can be handled with dignity, grace, and respect.

The flooding of Hardin Cemetery was one of the greatest cemetery disasters in modern history.

For many of those involved, it was a defining moment in their lives.

For the community of Hardin, it was a chance to revisit lost memories, and return their loved ones to rest, and to make sure that no one was ever forgotten.

♪ Windows wide, the curtains fly ♪ ♪ To catch the evening breeze ♪ Without you here to keep me warm ♪ ♪ Believe I'd rather freeze ♪ Believe I'd rather freeze ♪ And how long can we walk that line ♪ ♪ Between the sea and sand ♪ How long can we bide our time ♪ ♪ For dreams we never planned ♪ For dreams we never planned ♪ When the sky say the winter time ♪ ♪ Is coming on ♪ And you cry to see a shadow, babe ♪ ♪ That's growing long ♪ Across the lawn ♪ Another song