More rain was heading for flood-ravaged Iowa yesterday, where tens of thousands of residents have been forced to flee their homes and officials struggled to reinforce breached levies and stem the rushing waters.
Cedar Rapids got some relief on Saturday as the flood receded more quickly than expected. The city has been hit the hardest, with 1,300 streets submerged and 24,000 of the city’s 124,000 residents forced out of their homes.
But the rushing water was heading straight for Iowa City, where 35 blocks were already inundated and crews loaded sandbags into boats and army trucks to reinforce barricades in danger of breaching.
PHOTO: AP
The college town’s sloping hills will save it from total devastation, but at least 10 percent of its buildings will be inundated by the time the river crests around midnight today, Johnson County spokesman Mike Sullivan said.
And it will take at least a week for the river to return to normal levels.
“This is a flood of epic proportions,” Sullivan said. “It’s absolutely devastating.”
A large swath of Des Moines was underwater after a river levee was breached in the city of 200,000 of Saturday morning and officials were concerned that a forecasted evening thundershower could raise river levels even higher.
Muddy water from the Des Moines River covered several bridges and poured down streets north of the state Capitol, swallowing a neighborhood with about 200 homes and 40 businesses.
At least 2,500 volunteers had registered to help hold the water back by filling and laying down even more sandbags under the hot sun.
“This has been a very trying week for our state,” Iowa Governor Chet Culver said in a statement.
Serious flooding has hit the entire region, including parts of South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
The death toll from the extreme weather stands at 16 in Iowa and five more elsewhere in the Midwest.
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