Amid the battle to hold back the swollen Mississippi River, some towns got an unwelcome surprise on Saturday as river levels rose higher than projected.
Recent levee breaks north of Canton had allowed the river level to drop at towns like Canton and Hannibal in northeast Missouri.
Officials knew the water would rise again to crests expected during the weekend, and while the amount of the increase caught them off guard, it did not make things any worse. The folks in Canton were keeping a tight watch over the city’s levee, but it continued to hold strong against the Mississippi.
PHOTO: AFP
Flooding and widespread storms this month have forced thousands from their homes and inundated towns and cities along rivers in six US states, killing 24 and injuring 148 since June 6.
But while the swollen Mississippi has topped or broken through levees for hundreds of kilometers above St. Louis, the flooding has not led to any deaths or significant injuries yet in Missouri or Illinois.
The Mississippi reached 8.02m on Saturday morning at Canton, after dipping below 7m two days earlier, and was expected to crest later in the day at 8.05m.
That’s still more than a foot lower than the record set during the Great Flood of 1993, and 90cm below the top of the city’s levee.
The new Saturday morning reading was “a full foot [30cm] higher than we expected it to be,” said Monica Heaton, Canton emergency management spokeswoman. “The levee’s fine, but the river did another unexpected thing last night.”
Forecasters said on Saturday afternoon the river would crest somewhat higher than expected in Hannibal, Missouri, and at Quincy, Illinois, where the river was set to crest late in the day more than 60cm below the 1993 flood.
Hannibal emergency management director John Hark said the river was well above flood stage but still about 90cm below the record set in 1993. Before a levee break north of Hannibal in Meyer, Illinois, allowed some water to drain out of the river last week, Hannibal was expecting a crest at or near the record.
The crest was revised on Saturday to 8.87m, set to arrive in author Mark Twain’s hometown sometime yesterday morning.
Down river, near St. Louis, the latest federal forecast called for lower crests than predicted a day earlier. That was good news in hard-hit Lincoln County, where five levees had broken in the past three days.
At Foley, more than half of the homes in the town of 200 residents were under water, and townspeople were only beginning to decide whether to go back or move out.
Sandbags atop Canton’s levee offer protection up to 9m, but the river had been saturating the levee for days.
National Weather Service meteorologist Ben Miller speculated that forecast models simply had been unable to account for the amount of water flowing into the Mississippi from the three rivers that saw major flooding in Iowa — the Cedar, Iowa and Des Moines rivers.
“Honestly, the models didn’t do well with it because it was so far out of the range of normal,” Miller said.
Miller was unaware of any levees facing renewed danger because of the river’s unexpected rise, but said river towns need to be aware that the flood is a long way from over.
“Obviously any town protected by a levee is still under risk,” Miller said. “The longer you have levees that have water up against them, the better the chance you have a levee being compromised.”
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