Amid the worst flooding the US town of Fenton has ever seen, Tammy Morgan took a break on Wednesday from shoveling sand into the yellow bags she hoped would save her business and pointed to a line of treetops rising from the water.
There, she said, about 100m away, past streets and clapboard houses now submerged, is where the Meramec River should be — not lapping at the grass about 1m away.
“It’s pretty far away,” she said. “It’s a lot to get up here, you know?”
Some of the highest flood stages ever recorded hit the Mississippi River basin, part of a band of severe flooding stretching from northern Texas to the Ohio River Valley, affecting millions of people. Neighborhoods have been evacuated, towns inundated, roads and water-treatment plants closed.
In Illinois and Missouri, where the governors declared states of emergency across wide swaths of the states, officials have said that as of Thursday, 20 people had been killed by the floods.
In addition, the trouble here continues, with the flood crest expected to be making its way down the Mississippi River well into this week. While the Mississippi was expected to remain about 1m short of its record height at St Louis, downstream, at places like Cape Girardeau and New Madrid, Missouri, and at Memphis, Tennessee, it could approach or equal records set in the floods of 2011 and 1993, the US Army Corps of Engineers and the US National Weather Service reported.
“We’re not over it yet,” Missouri Governor Jay Nixon said after touring some of the flooded areas.
For people in this region, rising waters mean more road closures and many people are already stranded. Morgan and her husband, Jodi, who live in Eureka, another town battling floods, feared they would be unable to get home.
“Fenton will become an island, I’m afraid, here shortly,” Fenton Mayor Michael Polizzi said.
The hardest-hit region is eastern Missouri, particularly in the small towns along the banks of Meramec, southwest of St Louis, where the river winds its way toward the Mississippi.
The usual declarations from victims that they had never seen anything like it somehow fell short, as the Meramec and its tributaries shattered previous flood records on Wednesday. In places, the Meramec rose 8.23m above flood stage — as much as 0.91m higher than had ever been recorded.
“It’s of such proportions that it’s very difficult to use the correct words to tell you how bad it is,” said Polizzi, who has lived here for 20 years.
Morgan said that of all the entrepreneurial risks she envisioned when she took over Sisters Tea House, the thought that the placid river down the hill would rise up and swallow the historic heart of this town of 4,000 people was not one of them.
Fenton officials made plans to deposit rocks as temporary roads into stranded subdivisions, while in parts of the town’s business district, it was hard to tell that roads ever existed. A transmission shop, a brick bungalow housing a commercial glass company and a bar sat side by side, each submerged about halfway under what had essentially become a vast lake.
Just up the road, people stood on a bridge spanning the river, and gawked at the flotsam that raced downstream — including a roof.
The rivers surged over their levees, evacuation orders were issued for thousands of people in several towns, and the Missouri Department of Transportation closed a 38.62km stretch of Interstate 44 — the major artery through the area — most of it under water.
Emergency workers, National Guardsmen and volunteers built sandbag barriers and patrolled streets in motorboats, rescuing people and pets from rooftops, while a house that had been swept from its foundation drifted down the Meramec.
The entire town of West Alton, population 500, north of St Louis, was evacuated, after the Mississippi topped a levee there.
The deluge struck at a time of year that normally brings snow, not rain. The region’s worst floods usually hit in spring and summer, but an unusually wet and warm fall had saturated the ground.
Then, from Dec. 26 through Monday, a powerful line of slow-moving and unseasonably warm storms spawned a string of tornadoes near Dallas and dropped heavy rain across an arc hundreds of kilometers long. A few places in southern and eastern Missouri, including the town of Union, a short drive upstream from Fenton, recorded more than 300cm in just two days.
Rivers went from well-controlled to severely flooded in a matter of hours, as forecasters repeatedly raised their predictions of how deep rivers would become, leaving residents unsure what to believe.
“A day and a half ago it was 39.8 feet [12.13m],” said Fenton resident Alan Schiller, 49, said on Wednesday. “Yesterday it was 42 feet, until last night. They raised it another foot last night.”
Olde Towne Fenton Pet Hospital office manager Connie Govero pointed out a back window of the business, toward a wooded bluff a couple of football fields away. A creek sits at the bottom of the bluff and she said that the water was contained to the area immediately around the creek when she got to work on Tuesday morning.
By the time she left about 8pm on Tuesday, the water was trickling into the hospital’s parking lot, and by Wednesday morning, the lower level was flooded, Govero said.
“The water came up a whole lot faster than normal,” she said.
Since the 2011 flood, the US Army Corps of Engineers has worked to strengthen the levee system in places that were hard-hit, such as Cairo, Illinois, with projects such as installing underground barriers to keep water from seeping through porous soil under the levees.
“We haven’t seen any levee failures,” and that should remain true, corps spokesman Rene Poche said.
However, with the Mississippi spilling over levees in some places and seeping under them in others, “there will be flooding,” he said.
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