James Scott- The Man Who Caused Flood So He Could Cheat On His Wife Peacefully

James Robert Scott born November 20, 1969 is an American man who was found guilty of causing the Great Flood of 1993 in West Quincy, Missouri, which caused the Mississippi River to flood heavily.

James' Early Life

Scott is a native of Quincy, Illinois. By his twenties, he had served time in six prisons for different crimes.

While the majority of these arrests were for burglary, two were for arson. In 1982, he burned down Webster Elementary School in Quincy, which was his elementary school. In 1988, he burned down a garage and started multiple additional fires, earning him a seven-year prison sentence.

Scott was released on parole for the 1988 fire in 1993.

The Great Flood of 1993

The flood that happened from April to October 1993 in the Midwest of the United States along the Mississippi, Missouri, and their tributaries. Damages from the flood cost $15 billion, which is about $31 billion in today's money. It was one of the most expensive and disastrous events to ever happen in the United States.

During Mississippi River flooding in 1993, the Scotts and several other residents of Quincy and Hannibal spent the majority of mid-July repairing the West Quincy levee. By the 16th of July, the river had ceased to rise and plummeted 46 centimeters (1.51 feet) below the levee. However, the levee crumbled suddenly that night when the river broke through its main stem.

Levee is an embankment built to prevent the overflow of a river.

The Great Flood of 1993 was the most expensive and catastrophic flood to strike the United States in modern times. Thousands of people were forced to evacuate their homes, levees were breached, agriculture, towns, and transportation lines were damaged, and 47 people perished as a direct result of the flood.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the Department of Commerce said that the flood caused tremendous human misery. At least seventy-five towns were entirely submerged, and some have not been rebuilt. The 1993 Great Flood swamped over 20 million acres across nine states. During the flood, over 54,000 people were evacuated from flooded areas, and around 50,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. Losses were estimated between $15 and $20 billion.

Investigating The Cause of The Flood

WGEM-TV, the NBC station in Quincy, was informed by two DOT employees at the edge of the bridge that a man standing nearby was the first on the scene.

She approached him, and Scott offered to conduct a live interview with her. Scott stated that he had identified a weak place on the levee and attempted to reinforce it with additional sandbags. He then claimed he went for a drink, only to return to find the levee broken.

Neal Baker, a sergeant with the Quincy Police Department, was skeptical of Scott's explanation of the flood. Baker was familiar with Scott; as a patrolman, he had arrested Scott for the 1982 and 1988 arsons.

Baker observed that Scott appeared too clean to have spent the entire day working on a levee. Also, he had difficulty recalling even the most basic information on his work on the levee. Baker also observed that Scott lacked a life jacket.

The officials in Missouri were also skeptical. The breach occurred at one of the levee's strongest spots, which had been examined two hours before the disaster. When they learned about Scott's extensive criminal record, which included arson, their suspicions grew.

A week later, he was extensively interviewed and he couldn't maintain the initial story he had told.

The Quincy police detained Scott on October 1 for an unrelated burglary charge. Under interrogation, he admitted shifting four sandbags from one area of the levee to the trouble spot he claimed to have observed.

The Reason Behind Scott's Crime

Authorities got really curious and decided to go deep in investigating Scott. They made contact with Scott's friend, Joe Flachs. According to his account, Scott had told him earlier he destroyed the levee in order to have his wife stranded on the Missouri side of the river.

He wanted to keep his wife away so he would be free to have an affair without being troubled.

After that, investigators found more people who said that Scott had bragged about breaking the levee at a party after the flood. Based on these facts, Scott was taken to Missouri in November 1994 to stand trial.

He was tried and given a sentence of 10 years to life in prison, which would be added to the 10 years he was already serving for burglary in Illinois.

This could be recognized as one of the most expensive affair in human history.