Crews Pour Their Faith, Muscle Into Key Levee : Barriers: Thousands of acres of land and 10 towns depend on those fighting the river at the Sny Island wall.

In the war to hold back the Mississippi River, the stand at the Sny river wall was the mother of all levee battles, a struggle waged Thursday by thousands of flood workers to shore up 52 miles of soaked clay berm.

Wading shin-deep in mud and drainage ditches as the river crept toward an expected 32-foot-high crest, 2,000 volunteers, National Guard troops and prison inmates heaved sandbags and scattered straw and burlap for miles along the Sny Island levee.

By 7 p.m. Thursday, as the river neared its high-water mark, the levee was leaching ground water and riddled with ominous sand boils, but still holding.

“We’re looking good,” said “Purple” Davis, a farmer manning Pike Station, an outpost for trucks and bulldozers just yards from the leaking levee. “Our people have heart enough to keep this county dry.”

The battle for the levee along the western bank of Pike County, Ill., has been the most critical defense of agricultural territory since the Mississippi began rising two weeks ago.

Within its serpentine clay mounds, the second-longest river levee in the nation, about 110,000 acres of fertile farmland and 10 river towns lay imperiled.

Even as the Mississippi has crumbled levee after levee like wafer-thin dominoes, the farmers defending this barrier have maintained a defiant belief in their jury-rigged dike--and their ability to keep it whole.

Despite countless leaks, the levee has never been fully breached in 105 years. Its defenders insist that it will not suffer the fate of scores of other earthen Jerichos in Illinois, Missouri and Iowa. The Mississippi, they crowed late Thursday, will not bring their wall down.

“We had our scary moments, but I’d say we’ve seen the worst of it,” said Butch Colston, a heavy-equipment operator who is among an inner circle of farmers and laborers devising strategies to stem the Mississippi.

Still, Colston said he was not about to let his guard down. Another week of high water is predicted before the river retreats.

Two weeks of flooding have left the levee as soft and mealy as a sand castle. The crest rolled past the northern reaches of the levee at 6 p.m. Thursday, but because of its length, the high water is not expected to pass the southern extreme of the levee for another 24 to 36 hours.

“It’s like a snake swallowing a weasel. When it gets to the tail, I’ll relax,” said Tom Hill, a levee worker who has spent 14 nights patrolling a deserted stretch of levee near Pike Station.

Only the 1,700-mile Main Stem Mississippi River levee, which winds along both sides of the river from Cape Girardeau, Mo. to Venice, La., is longer than the Sny Island levee. Built in the early 1870s by basin landowners with 400 teams of horses and hundreds of laborers, the levee tamed the river and sent land values soaring.

But even using four-wheel-drive vehicles, the levee is difficult to patrol. At night, a dozen farmers race up and down looking for leaks. Yet some spots have been left alone as long as two hours.

In a mud-spattered vehicle, Hill made several trips to a giant sand boil that bubbled up Thursday from water pressure building beneath an isolated stretch of the levee near Atlas.

More than 100 boils have erupted in fields and algae-topped ditches behind the levee. Each boil is a potential weak spot caused by rising ground water, a breach that could blow out an entire section of levee wall if it is not contained.

“She’s looking good today,” Hill said, sifting through watery sand. “We’ve got four foot of sandbags to keep the pressure on. You never know, though. You ignore this baby too long and the wall could blow right here.”

So many skirmish lines have been drawn along the length of the great wall that levee workers have begun devising their own names for remote tracts of river bank, branding the land like Civil War soldiers once marked their unnamed battlefields.

One is Dead Dog, a creek bed named for a canine corpse levee workers found when they arrived to hold the wall.

“Even the buzzards wouldn’t touch that poor sucker,” Colston said.

There is the Pole, named for a solitary wood beam that rises from a barren stretch of levee. There is Miller’s Corner, named for an old woman who once lived near one bend, but whom no one remembers. Dead Dog and the Pole, Mallard Duck and Larry’s Landing, Blackjack and Bunge have all become familiar to sandbaggers.

“We got trouble down here at Blackjack!” a farmer radioed, his voice quavering over a CB channel to flood planners at the central command post at New Canton.

After pinpointing Blackjack on a sheath of maps, flood planners calmed the farmer down. All he wanted was some extra straw to lay over levee seepage.

“Don’t worry about Willard,” said Jeannie Cox, the treasurer for the Sny Island levee commission. “He always gets excited.”

Flood crews rushed back and forth to secure trouble spots. Several creeks behind the levee were on the rise, threatening to create weak points along where they spilled into the Mississippi.

Near the northern town of Marblehead, leaks were so numerous that crews laid wood planks against the levee to keep it upright.

The last time workers laid wood against the levee was in 1965. The Dunker Break of that year, which was small compared to the breaches of a century ago, nevertheless spilled river water over about 1,000 acres of flood plain.

Crews held wooden barn doors against the rushing tide long enough for others to pile hundreds of sand bags behind them.

“Some of those boys just about committed suicide,” recalled Lloyd Dolbeare, Pike County’s emergency coordinator. “They filled up their rubber hip waders with water so the water couldn’t knock them over. All it would’ve took was one big wave and they’d have drowned on the spot.”

Even as the river rose in the past two weeks, few flood workers betrayed that sense of desperation.

Mervin McCoy, 66, a bulldozer driver from Burlington, Iowa, left his machine in a field of mud and strode up the clay wall of the levee Thursday morning and peered at a measuring stick jammed into the mud. The water line was a foot and a half from the top.

“If it gets to the top of that pole, then I’ll be worried,” McCoy said. “You ever see a bulldozer haul ass? It’s a sight, let me tell you.”

But behind the line, in towns dotting the Mississippi shelf, worried residents still braced for the dreaded wail of firehouse sirens signaling a major break. The community of Hull was almost a ghost town. Only a few die-hards remained, riding on lawn-mowing tractors and feeding their clay-speckled hogs as if Thursday was merely another sleepy, rainy day on the levee.

But the Gudger family was taking no chances and loaded a trailer with their worldly possessions.

Marvin Gudger, 71, a retired Burlington Northern Railroad engineer, slumped on a lawn chair on his back porch while his bearded grandsons, Ronnie and Chad, hefted antique walnut secretaries, cupboards and commodes out the back door.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” Gudger said. “I never dreamed it would come to this.”

He and his wife, Betty, had already taken a room at a motel in Pittsfield, well to the east of the threatened flood basin. All that remained was a few more hours of loading before he locked up the house for good.

Most of their belongings were already gone. But like anyone forced to abandon their old lives in a few short hours, Gudger mourned the things he was leaving behind.

There were so many things from his railroad days that would have to stay, an entire collection of engine locks, lanterns, keys--a life’s worth of memories.

“Lord, please keep that water back,” he said, sifting through a box that would have to stay. “Tell that river to have mercy.”

Flood Facts

Totals to date on the Midwest flood: * Estimated deaths: 21 to 25 * Homes destroyed or heavily damaged: 8,100 * Evacuations: More than 30,000

PAST DISASTERS Disaster relief payments by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the past. Current flood damage estimated at $8 billion. * Tropical Storm Agnes (1972): $493 million * Bay Area quake (1989): $731 million * Hurricane Andrew (1992): $1.32 billion * Hurricane Hugo (1989): $1.54 billion

KILLER CURRENT * River flow in Quincy, Ill.: 3,740,000 gallons per second * Normal for Quincy: 531,080 gallons per second * Niagara Falls: 748,000 gallons per second

Sources: FEMA, WeatherData Inc., Times staff, Times wire reports, Encyclopedia Americana

The Last Stand

Along many segments of the Mississippi River, levees are the only deterrent against rising floodwaters. These tall mounds of earth, rock and sand keep most of the cresting river water from overflowing into low-lying residential and agricultural areas.

HOW LEVEES BREAK 1. River swells to flood levels. 2. Levees, reinforced with sandbags, keep cresting waters from overflowing. 3. Water begins seeping through soil below levees. The longer the flood levels are sustained in an area, the more saturated the soil becomes. 4. Floodwater begins to push upward toward the surface. 5. Surfacing water creates small pools, also called “sand bubbles,” which are the beginning of a levee break. Sandbags are placed around a “sand bubble” to contain it. 6. As the pools of water grow in size, bulldozers are then brought in to plow earthen berms around them.

REGION AT RISK

If a waterlogged 54-mile long levee below Quincy, Ill., breaks open, a 150-square mile area of prime farm land will be flooded. Points in the river just above Quincy have turned into 16-mile-wide lakes because of levee failure. Sources: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Times reports, wire reports