A Levee Breached, and New Worries Downstream

But now the risk is flowing downstream.

Waters released into the 130,000-acre floodway by the corps will soon re-enter the Mississippi near New Madrid, through two 5,500-foot stretches blasted out over two days at the lower end of the basin, and the crest will continue to roll on, with the river expected to match or beat its previous record heights at many points along the way.

For the people responsible for trying to manage the unmanageable river, each success is replaced by new worries.

“We’re just at the beginning of the beginning,” said Maj. Gen. Michael J. Walsh of the Army Corps of Engineers and president of the Mississippi River Commission.

His decision to inundate the 130,000 acres within the spillway’s basin almost certainly saved the town of Cairo, Ill. The river had reached a record 61.7 feet at Cairo before the explosion and was predicted to rise more than a foot further.

The river fell to 60.1 feet by Tuesday afternoon. But, General Walsh warned, the floodway only offered temporary relief and the water levels upstream could soon rise again. “The crest will come back up,” he added. “We’ll see where we go from there.”

The people whose land was under all that water watched with wonder and dismay.

“She’s coming across here now, ain’t she?” Ed Marshall, 57, a farmer, said as he arrived Tuesday to get an early sense of the damage with his insurance agent atop the interior levee that forms the western boundary of the spillway. “There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s in God’s hands.”

Mark Dugan, 59, used binoculars to find the top of his recently remodeled farmhouse poking out, like an iceberg, from the fast-moving water. A shed had been washed into a stand of trees.

“We just question the way they did it,” he said of the Army Corps of Engineers. “Actually we even question the fact they did do it.”

Gov. Jay Nixon visited the emergency command center here on Tuesday, declaring, “It’s a lot of water out there, folks.” He was not talking just about the river, but also about communities farther inland, where days of rain had saturated and covered the ground.

Mr. Nixon pledged to commit resources to restoring the area. “It goes beyond rebuilding the levee,” he said. “It’s about rebuilding the farm economy here.”

Carlin Bennett, the presiding commissioner for Mississippi County, said his community’s biggest fear was that the plan to use the spillway would ultimately have little effect: “You blow the levee, it ruins us and you don’t get any relief up or downstream.”

Meanwhile the surging river, and the flooding it is almost certain to cause, moved south. More than 40 percent of the nation’s waters drain into the Mississippi, and relentless rainfall is creating formidable challenges.

“We’re going to fight this river all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico,” said Col. Vernie L. Reichling Jr., who commands the Memphis District of the corps. He estimated that the corps had already spent $5 million fighting the flood in his district. “I don’t see this letting up,” he said, adding that he expected to be fighting the flooding into next month.

While the main defenses along the Mississippi are expected to hold up under the onslaught, flooding is likely as water backs up into the rivers and tributaries that feed into the Mississippi, and tests “non-federal” levees that line those waterways.

“The water can’t drain into the Mississippi because the river levels are so high,” said Jeff Graschel of the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And while the federal levees are high and strong, “anything that’s non-federal is a different story,” he said.

A. G. Sulzberger reported from Sikeston, and John Schwartz from New York. Malcolm Gay contributed reporting from Cairo, Ill.

 

Plan to Breach Levee in Missouri Advances

“We’ve been told to go, but we’ve got two more cells of lightning that need to move through here before we start to pump,” Jim Lloyd, the corps’ operations team leader, said as he walked through the wind and rain late Sunday afternoon. “We’re going to work through the night to get this loaded.”

Mr. Lloyd, who had just left a briefing, emphasized that although Maj. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, who commands the Mississippi Valley Division of the corps, had ordered that the explosives be loaded, he had yet to give the final word to blast the levee.

“He’ll still have to make the decision,” Mr. Lloyd said, adding that although the explosives were extremely stable and would not be primed, the lightning was “going to complicate our lives something fierce.”

Earlier in the day, Missouri officials made a last-ditch effort to spare the levee when the state’s attorney general turned to the United States Supreme Court, asking it to overturn a day-old order from the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit that had allowed the corps to proceed with the operation. The state was later denied.

But even as the legal fight played out, General Walsh was directing the two barges stationed at a nearby staging area to prepare to move into the final position from which crews could begin injecting the levees with 265 tons of explosives to blast the earthen structure.

“It will be a heaving of soil — the levee will be excavated very rapidly,” said Nick Boone, a mechanical engineer who leads the corps’ blasting team. “On this upper end, it’s going to look like a waterfall. It’s an instant removal, and that’s the whole point — instant relief of the entire system.”

Blowing the levee will serve as a fiery coda to an agonizing round of deliberations that has played out here over the past several days, as General Walsh has weighed the interests of about 200 people living in the floodway against the safety of Cairo, Ill., a struggling town of around 3,000 people that lies on a winnowed slip of land between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The move is expected to drop water levels upstream by roughly four feet.

General Walsh has toured the affected region over the past several days, meeting with residents and studying data provided by his team of experts. All the while, the surging rivers have continued to rise.

“?‘Project Flood’ is upon us,” he said in a statement on Sunday. “It is testing the system like never before.”

The problem is essentially one of drainage. With both rivers running high, they have backed up above the confluence, raising water levels upstream and causing major underseepage in Cairo, weakening the town’s defenses and prompting city officials there to call for a mandatory evacuation.

“It’s a no-brainer, the ground’s softening,” said Mayor Judson Childs of Cairo, who on Monday leaves office to be replaced by a new mayor. “This could change from minute to minute.”

On Sunday, Illinois state troopers went door to door rousting residents and patrolling the empty streets. A crew of inmates from the Tamms Correctional Center continued to fill sandbags at the north end of town, and emergency vehicles raced along Washington Avenue. Otherwise, the streets were largely empty as residents appeared to heed the evacuation order, fleeing town in a diminishing stream of cars.

Pulling his truck onto Washington Avenue, Harry Williams said he had evacuated last night but returned to get some medicine for his father-in-law and check on his property.

“I was worried about looters,” said Mr. Williams, who is staying with family north of town. “But it looks like they’re patrolling the town a lot better now.”

A few blocks down the road, Sebastian Thomas, lounging in a plastic lawn chair outside a self-service car wash, said the only thing that would make him evacuate was “about six feet of water.”

A. G. Sulzberger contributed reporting.

 

Levee Breach Moves One Step Closer

 

“There are still a lot of decision points as we move forward,” Maj. Gen. Michael J. Walsh said Saturday, stressing that no final decision had been reached. “The system has never been under this type of pressure.”

For days now, General Walsh, the man charged with making the final call, has toured the area and huddled with experts as he has weighed this decision worthy of King Solomon: blast a two-mile breach into the levee at Birds Point, Mo., and inundate roughly 200 square miles of farmland and some 90 homes, or hold steady and risk drowning this once-proud city that is now struggling for survival along a narrow spit of land bounded by the surging Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

Meanwhile, the rivers have continued to swell toward what analysts say will be historic levels, prompting Mayor Judson Childs of Cairo to issue a mandatory evacuation for this city of 3,000. The National Weather Service has forecast up to 5 inches of rain in coming days, leading corps analysts to warn that the river could stay at historic flood stages for more than five days.

“That sort of sustained crest puts an enormous amount of pressure on the entire system,” said Col. Vernie Reichling, the corps’ Memphis District commander, who has also led troops in Afghanistan. “It’s a very complex system. It’s a lot more difficult than just saying, ‘Go charge that hill.’?”

But while many residents in the area say they appreciate the intricacy of General Walsh’s decision, the situation has led to strained relations between Missouri farmers to the south, and residents of this majority African-American city marred by vacant buildings, drug abuse and poverty.

“Farmland over people? That’s ridiculous,” said Dorian Weems, 45, as he stuffed garbage into two overflowing trash cans outside his home near the flood wall. Mr. Weems, who said he was going to stay there as long as possible because he feared looters, added: “I think it’s a money thing. If Cairo gets flooded, they ain’t losing much — it’s just a bunch of low-income people there, so it doesn’t matter.”

Across the river in Missouri, Ellenann Howton said she feared her 90-acre spread would be “washed away” if the corps breached the Birds Point levee.

“I’ve cried. I’ve thrown up. I don’t eat because I’m so stressed,” said Ms. Howton, 59, who has lived on her land for 31 years and spent the past few days ferrying her valuables and more than 50 dogs and cats to safer ground. “I’m just sick-hearted about it. Why sacrifice one side for the other? I’ve never understood that.”

Missouri officials sued unsuccessfully last week to try to block the corps from flooding the cropland, a federally mandated flood way that is home to about 200 people. On Saturday, the Eighth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s decision, clearing the way for the corps to move forward if necessary.

If General Walsh orders the levee breached, the two barges will pump explosives into an 11,000-foot system of pipes buried below the levee. A detonation crew will then blast the levee, allowing water to tear through the gap at an estimated 550,000 cubic feet per second, which they expect to drastically lower water levels upstream. Over the following 24 hours, the crew would blast two more holes in the levee downstream, allowing the water to re-enter the river.

“These are people’s homes, their livelihoods,” said Russ Davis, chief of the corps’ Operations Division. “We really don’t want to do this.”

The levee has been breached only once before, during the flood of 1937, and though officials in surrounding Mississippi County, Mo., say the majority of residents oppose breaching the levee, the situation is beyond their control.

“It’s going to take out one-third of my county — that’s a lot of good people with lots of history here,” said Sheriff Keith Moore of Mississippi County. “It’s going to be a tsunami for Mississippi County, but what I say isn’t going to make a difference. It’s one man’s call.”

Across the river, in the parking lot of an auto parts store in Cairo, a detail from the Illinois Army National Guard filled sandbags alongside a work crew from the Tamms Correctional Center, a state penitentiary 18 miles north of Cairo.

“If I had to choose, I’d have to go with life over land,” Mayor Childs said. “I wish I could flip a switch so the farmers would be happy and the citizens would be safe. Unfortunately, I can’t.”