Workers rush to fortify threatened river levees
IOWA CITY, Iowa – With floodwaters receding in much of Iowa, the destruction moved downstream Tuesday as emergency crews and residents raced to bolster the levees that protect dozens of Mississippi River towns.
National Guardsmen joined hundreds of volunteers in filling sandbags and reinforcing earthen barriers in southeast Iowa, eastern Missouri and western Illinois. The mood grew frantic when several major Mississippi tributaries spilled over their banks and the river surpassed record flood levels, swamping towns along the way.
Early Tuesday morning, more than a dozen sandbagging volunteers and a motorist had to be rescued when a levee was breached in Carthage Lake, Ill. – about 70 miles southwest of Davenport, Iowa. The advancing water swamped farmland and the community of Gulfport, Ill., leading officials to shut down the Great River Bridge that connects to Missouri.
In Burlington, Iowa, postal workers and schoolteachers waded through waist-high, muck-filled waters, dragging plastic sheets and lugging sandbags in an effort to hold back the flow.
In La Grange, Mo., residents watched as the Mississippi River filled the streets for a third time in 15 years. The post office was flooded, and the city hall was in danger. So were scores of homes in the town of about 1,000, whose residents were forced to rebuild after floods in 1993 and in 2001.
“A third time? I can’t do it,” Harold Ludwig, 68, the town’s former mayor, told the Associated Press. “I’m sorry.”
Part of the problem, said Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Ron Fournier, was that it is nearly impossible to predict which levees – such as the sandbag and earth-based barriers being furiously built along the Mississippi – might crumble beneath the mounting water pressure. So officials don’t know where to focus time and energy.
“That’s a crystal ball that nobody has,” Fournier told reporters.
President Bush, who plans to visit Iowa on Thursday to tour the disaster region, said at a news conference that funds would be set aside to aid flood victims. “I, unfortunately, have been to too many disasters as president,” Bush said.
State and federal economic experts still were busy tallying the damage to large swaths of the Midwest on Tuesday, and they insisted that the effects would be substantial.
For more than a week, flood- waters have prevented farmers from planting soybeans and damaged the season’s emerging corn crop. Analysts estimated that Iowa, Illinois and the other corn states might produce 15 percent less than last year. Some believe the shortfall will be larger.
The storms have hit Iowa particularly hard. Gov. Chet Culver has declared 83 of the state’s 99 counties disaster areas. The floods have left an estimated 38,000 homeless.
State officials estimated the damage to Iowa’s corn crop alone at more than $2.7 billion, with the cost of repairing and rebuilding Cedar Rapids – the state’s second-largest city – expected to be at least $1 billion.