2 Major Rivers Threaten to Cut Path Upstream

Merciless flooding throughout the Midwest threatened Thursday to move the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers upstream by 20 miles, at least temporarily, and wash out a peninsula, a county under evacuation and several hundred people defying orders to leave.

More rain fell in Illinois, Kansas and Missouri, although not so heavily. Forecasters said the weather might look a little better by early next week. But they hedged their bets. Jim Henderson, a deputy director of the National Weather Service, declared: “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

Damage estimates mounted. President Clinton said he would visit the Midwest on Saturday. It would be his third visit in two weeks. James Lee Witt, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the total bill for flood wreckage might climb to more than $8 billion. The death toll stood at 25. Swamped acreage mounted to 6 million.

The homeless in three states alone--Illinois, Iowa and Missouri--numbered 30,000.

For a fifth day, Des Moines, Iowa, went without water in its taps. City officials said it would take them until Monday to restore any water service at all--one day longer than they had expected. Drinking water, they said, was still a month off. Streets and bridges in Des Moines reopened, but there were few people downtown.

“We’re turning the corner, the river levels have dropped,” Mayor John Dorrian said. “But we’re nowhere near over this crisis.”

In St. Louis, officials said it was possible that the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, which meet north of the city, could break through enough levees to wash together 20 miles farther upstream. The Mississippi surpassed its 1973 record height of 43.23 feet at St. Louis and was still rising at nightfall.

The Missouri reached record heights at Jefferson City, Mo. It runs parallel to the Mississippi for about 15 miles before they meet. Two minor levees between the two rivers have been broken, and water from the Mississippi has swept across two miles. It was lapping at the back of a main levee holding the Missouri.

If the Missouri punches through the main levee and its water combines with the water from the Mississippi, the two rivers would wash across a peninsula in between. The peninsula includes West Alton, Mo.

Marty Limpert, manning a St. Charles County command post, told the Associated Press that the levee appeared to be holding. If it does not hold, he said, “it would be a major concern. . . . All that water from the Missouri is going to start pouring into St. Charles County.”

The county is a suburban area west of St. Louis. More than 7,000 people have been evacuated from the area. But officials said several hundred defied the evacuation order and stayed behind. Debi Hellebusch, a spokeswoman for the St. Charles County emergency management agency, said flooding was imminent.

The two rivers would not necessarily carve new channels, officials said. If they do move their confluence, the officials said, they likely would return to their normal channels once the floodwater receded.

“Overall, the forecast does not bode well for the Missouri and Mississippi River basins,” said Marty McKewon, senior meteorologist for WeatherData Inc., a private forecaster.

Moderate to heavy rain was possible today from extreme eastern Nebraska through Iowa, southern Minnesota and Illinois, McKewon said. On Saturday, he said, the rain would also hit northern Missouri. He predicted a break on Sunday. But moderate rain was still possible, he said, over Missouri and Southern Illinois.

Presidential Visit

The President said he would come to St. Louis on Saturday to talk to governors from eight states affected by the flooding. He visited Davenport, Iowa, last week on his way to an economic summit in Japan. On Thursday, he stopped in Des Moines on his way back from the summit.

Clinton announced his third visit after meeting with about 80 members of Congress, mainly from the Midwest, to brief them on his proposed $2.48-billion flood relief package, an amount that he said was bound to increase as damage estimates go up. Following a closed-door session at the Capitol, he told reporters that the legislators responded positively.

He said they seemed determined to complete work on the aid package within a few days.

“There is a bipartisan commitment . . . to aggressively push the flood relief package,” the President said. “There is a real feeling that this is something we ought to do together as a nation.”

Sen. Dave Durenberger (R--Minn.) made public a letter urging Clinton to offset the aid package with other budget reductions “so the federal deficit is not increased.” Durenberger said flooded communities must be rebuilt--”but not at the expense of future generations.”

Clinton responded that the 1990 budget bill “plainly conceives of genuine emergencies being funded outside the budgetary process,” as occurred when Congress appropriated aid for last year’s victims of Hurricane Andrew in South Florida and Louisiana. He also said that “some of the ongoing budget will take care” of a number of relief efforts.

Des Moines Wary

In downtown Des Moines, water receded in the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers, but residents kept a wary eye on the skies. Authorities said storms might bypass the city to the south once the weekend arrived.

Mayor John Dorrian barred nonessential workers from downtown buildings because fire sprinklers would not operate so long as water taps were dry.

Although water was expected to fill the taps on Monday, officials said it would not be safe to drink for at least a month. Until then, hospitals, businesses and homeowners will rely on 2.5 million gallons trucked in each day from as far away as Texas and Florida.

City officials said repairs at the Des Moines water treatment plant, crippled by contaminated flood water last weekend, were on schedule.

From the air, the water plant, fortified with a four-foot-high sandbag dike, looked like a war zone. Army helicopters hovered overhead, dropping new green and white sandbags. Hundreds of National Guardsmen and volunteers stacked them on top of the ever-growing dike.

Others swept mud and debris out of sodden buildings. The air reeked of drying mud mixed with chemicals and sewage.

As they prepared to restore water pressure citywide, officials asked residents to close their main water valves at all homes and businesses to keep internal plumbing from blowing out while the system refilled.

The system holds 30 million gallons of water.

“Once the system comes on line, people can flush toilets and shower,” said L. D. McMullen, director of the water treatment plant. “But we want people to use the water very preciously--treat it like gold.”

That meant, he said, no watering lawns or washing cars.

It remained to be seen whether orders to use water sparingly would survive pent up demand in the largest city in America to lose its water supply. Businesses, particularly those based downtown where 40,000 people remained out of work, were anxious to resume operations. And many residents had already decided what they would do when taps started working again.

“I’m going to jump in the bathtub and soak for hours,” said Charmaine Wade, 41, a street repair worker for the city who has been assigned to 12-hour shifts on special flood duty.

Bob Hoffman, 38, a salesman at a water pump repair firm said: “I’m going to put a lawn chair in the shower stall and enjoy it.”

There was a growing concern about disease. Julius Conner, health director for Polk County, which includes Des Moines, said consultants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta had arrived to review plans for combatting the potential outbreak of water-borne illnesses.

“We already have a problem with mosquitoes,” he said, “but it is going to get worse as the water recedes and begins to pool. Encephalitis is spread by mosquitoes.”

The city has administered 3,000 tetanus shots, free of charge, mostly to volunteers who have come in contact with contaminated water while sandbagging homes, businesses, roads and the flooded water plant.

Chris Atchison, director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, called a meeting with top U.S. health officials to determine the level of federal help the state will need in coming months. Their concerns included sewage problems, how to warehouse food that is pouring into the state and aiding mental health.

Rear Adm. Frank E. Young, director of the Federal Office of Emergency Preparedness, pledged a full federal response.

Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Iowa mounted an extraordinary effort to stay abreast of paperwork generated by its 1.2 million customers across the state.

Unable to operate in its downtown corporate headquarters, company officials opened makeshift, around-the-clock offices in a church and worked out of their homes to stay current with claims already filed.

A satellite dish was trucked in from Michigan to beam data to a processing center in Plano, Tex., in an effort to avoid lag time.

“The last thing our customers need to worry about during this crisis is their health care insurance,” said Diana Deibler, a spokeswoman for the company. “On a normal day, we process about 77,000 claims.”

In Clarksville, Mo., an hour’s drive north of St. Louis, the rains came again, but the wall held.

It warded off water from the Dugout Saloon, the city offices and Cooper’s grocery store, which has been in business for the last 75 years along the Mississippi River. While other towns succumbed to the river, Clarksville held.

People from Clarksville and others from all around the county put the wall together, bag by bag, over the last three weeks as the river began to rise. The Amish community near Bowling Green helped. So did a group from the Future Farmers of America.

But it all started at the Dugout Saloon.

The river itself was only a rock throw away, past the railroad tracks and the park, just below a big tree, now half-submerged. There is no levee at Clarksville, as there is along other parts of the river. There was never enough money to build one. And when the flood really started getting serious, a bunch at the Dugout decided it was their bound duty to save the saloon.

Diane Spencer, who owns the Dugout with her husband, Doug, has some pictures of those first days when, not knowing what was to come, they sandbagged Front Street to about knee level.

But the river kept rising.

They kept filling sandbags, higher and deeper and up and around the block past Cooper’s store and over by a big historic house next door. Then the sandbagging spread to the other side of the street. Pretty soon the entire town was involved.

For a long time, there were only five National Guardsmen assigned to Clarksville. That was all the mayor had asked for at first, before it became apparent how serious the flooding was going to be. When the mayor asked for more later, there were none to be had.

Then, on Wednesday, because levees failed upstream and no more sandbagging was needed there, 10 more Guardsmen were assigned to Clarksville.

“All you’ve got to do is start filling a bag or two, and it’s like the whole town comes swarming to help,” said Lt. Jeffrey Gower of the Missouri National Guard. “I sometimes think they’re sitting by their windows looking to see what they can do.”

Still, not all was sweetness. People building the wall on Front Street got into a spat with American Legion members who absconded with a backup pump. The Legionnaires had a brand new post just down the street, and they were working round the clock to try to save it.

But in the end, the wall was built.

It was impossible Thursday to walk into the front of the Dugout. The sandbags were eight feet high. Anyone who wanted lunch or a drink had to come in the back way, through the kitchen. They could look out the front door and see boats cruising past, at eye level.

As the river continued to rise, volunteers stood waist deep in water just off Front Street, loading sandbags on shallow-draft rowboats so they could be taken to needed areas around the wall.

Over at the grocery store, owner Thurmond Cooper, 77, talked about what it was like after the great Mississippi flood of 1973, about how the floor stank with an odor that did not leave for years. They cleaned and cleaned again, but still the waterlogged smell persisted. He said he was putting his faith in the wall this time.

He could not help but think that, at his age, he should not have to worry about this kind of thing anymore.

“I ought to be home just sitting down,” he said, “rather than worrying about the water.”

As the day wore on, 33 hardy souls stayed with their homes on Kaskaskia Island in Illinois.

It is truly an island, carved from the Illinois side of the Mississippi River nearly 150 years ago by the great New Madrid earthquake that changed the river channel.

Houses and fertile farmland are ringed by a levee that can handle 48 feet of water, said Capt. Orville Liefer, with the Randolph County Sheriff’s office.

“If we don’t get any real heavy rains, they’ll be all right,” Liefer said. “Those broken levees up north relieve some of the pressure down here.” But he worried about the flood and the people who would not leave.

The only real concession that the islanders have made to the river, Liefer said, was to move some farm equipment, just in case.

“They made it through the 1973 flood,” he said, “and family after family has gotten real well acquainted with the Mississippi. They don’t get too excited about it.”

The island’s quarter-mile bridge to St. Mary, Mo., was closed now. The Sheriff’s Department and the Army Corps of Engineers were ferrying residents by boat to the mainland whenever they wanted to go.

But the 33 vowed to stay, come hell or high water.

A Rainy Day Recipe for Disaster

The drenching storms that have shocked the Midwest this summer are the product of several forces: 1) The jet stream--the wind pattern in the upper atmosphere that moves from west to east--has dropped farther down than usual. It has provided energy to fuel storms. 2) A low-pressure system that has remained stationary in the central United States. 3) Warm air from the Gulf of Mexico has provided more heat and moisture than normal.

30-day Forecast: The region is expected to get normal to above-normal rain in the next four weeks, with average temperatures, forecasters say.

Source: WeatherData Inc.