Book Review: Damned to Eternity



Imagine a typical character in a John Mellencamp song, and you have a pretty good picture of James Scott, the protagonist of Adam Pitluk's latest work, focusing on the Great Midwestern Flood of 1993. Having spent nine years and considerable energy investigating Scott's bizarre role in that catastrophe, it's unfortunate that Pitluk, a journalist of evident diligence and skill, didn't have a more interesting or sympathetic protagonist on which to base his workmanlike account.

In the late spring and summer of 1993, torrential rains drenched large sections of the Midwest. By mid-July, the Army Corps of Engineers and local officials in the town of West Quincy, Mo., were engaged in a desperate struggle to keep the Mississippi River from topping the levee that protected the town. Despite heroic efforts authoritatively and movingly described in Damned to Eternity's early chapters, on the evening of July 16 the levee collapsed, inundating West Quincy and 14,000 acres of rich farmland.

When the time came to find a scapegoat, one quickly emerged: 23-year-old James Scott, of nearby Fowler, Ill. Scott, an alcoholic, combined a criminal past (two guilty pleas to arson, one as a juvenile), a loose tongue and a predilection for hanging out with unsavory characters eager to ingratiate themselves with the authorities. After a television interview placed him near the site of the levee break and one of his companions reported he'd bragged about moving sandbags to undermine the levee and strand his wife at her job in Missouri, leaving him free to party in Illinois, Scott's fate was sealed.  

Scott went to trial in 1994, charged under an obscure Missouri statute with "intentionally causing a catastrophe." When the first guilty verdict was overturned on appeal, he was tried again with the same result, and now resides in a Missouri correctional facility, sentenced to life and ineligible for parole until 2023.

Pitluk's account of the courtroom proceedings is straightforward and factual. Despite the jury's arguably erroneous decision to reject persuasive, and essentially unchallenged, expert testimony, the author's objective reporting fails to rouse any feeling that the verdict resulted in a miscarriage of justice. Yes, James Scott is likely to spend most of his adult life in prison, but from everything we learn about him, it's hard to shake the sense it would have been his fate absent the flood.

Perhaps the human desire to assign blame is encoded in our collective psyche or maybe it's merely a function of our times, when we've been conditioned to reject the notion that terrible things can happen without human intervention. Those fascinating questions are worthy of exploration, but while it's a competent true crime story, you won't find satisfying answers to them in Damned to Eternity.--Harvey Freedenberg

 

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