Hundreds of Families Flee Illinois Flood

The Illinois River swelled toward record levels Wednesday, forcing hundreds of families to flee their homes in the hard-hit Peoria area.

“I imagine up and down the river there’s probably 1,000 homes in the river right now,” said Angelo Zerbonia, project engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers in Peoria.

“We’re kind of losing track of the evacuations right now,” Chris Lofgren of the Peoria Red Cross said. He estimated that 300 area families had fled their homes.

The Red Cross fed lunch to more than 200 refugees at shelters, Marvin Miles, the agency’s disaster relief director, said.

Disaster Declared

Illinois Gov. James R. Thompson Wednesday declared 10 counties disaster areas, allowing residents to have flood-damaged property reassessed for tax purposes.

Emergency Services Director Chuck Jones, who flew over much of the 272-mile-long Illinois River on Wednesday, said that Rome and Chillicothe, 12 miles north of Peoria, and Liverpool, 30 miles downstream, appeared to be the worst hit by the flooding, caused by a combination of rain and melting snow.

“The water’s over the sandbags in those areas,” Greg Durham, an agency spokesman, said.

The National Weather Service forecast record high water all along the river, including a predicted 29.5-foot depth by Saturday at Peoria, where the flood stage is 18 feet and the current record, 28.8 feet, was set in 1943. The river was at an even 28 feet Wednesday.

‘Isn’t a Lot You Can Do’

“It’ll just be disastrous if it gets that high,” Gale Ownes, Peoria County chief deputy sheriff, said. “There isn’t a lot you can do to prevent damage.”

Warren Parr, Corps of Engineers assistant project engineer, said that high water pressure was threatening to “eat through and dissolve” numerous levees downstream of Peoria, which could send walls of water over farmers’ fields, marshlands and, in some cases, rural dwellings.

The Coast Guard closed the Illinois River to commercial boat traffic late Tuesday for fear that barge wakes would break levees.

Storm Shuts Schools

Meanwhile, in California, a cold, blustery storm shut dozens of schools in the Sierra foothills Wednesday, dumped up to three feet of new snow in the mountains and pelted the lowlands with hail and rain.

Snow was visible on the higher peaks dotting the San Francisco Bay Area. The Highway Patrol reported piles of slush on the higher elevations of heavily traveled Highway 17 between San Jose and Santa Cruz.

About 40 schools in the Auburn area, in the Sierra foothills at the 1,400-foot elevation, were closed by snowy roads.

Snow fell in Auburn, Placerville, Grass Valley, Nevada City, Colfax and Georgetown. Many power outages were reported overnight, most of them repaired by dawn by Pacific Gas & Electric crews.

The combination of wet weather from the Pacific and cold temperatures from the north was expected to bring the snow level as low as 500 feet Wednesday night, forecasters said.