Mississippi River Continues to Rise, Catches Iowa Community by Surprise : Weather: Floodwaters swell above expected crest as weary residents pile sandbags or flee for higher ground. Rain is still falling in some areas.

Residents who three times rejected flood-control measures watched the Mississippi River lap through their streets and rise higher than its predicted crest Saturday.

“It’s depressing,” said Scott Cortez as he took a break from piling sandbags around his home. “You wonder what’s going to happen.”

Downstream, residents of small towns evacuated or battled to strengthen levees against the pressure of the rushing water.

Upstream, still more heavy rain fell on the river’s tributaries in water-logged Minnesota.

A flood crest of 22 feet had been forecast at Davenport, but the National Weather Service said Saturday that the river would continue rising, cresting at 22.2 feet sometime today. Flood stage is 15 feet, and the record is 22.5 feet.

Fatigue from days of sandbagging was showing.

“The first couple of days, everybody was up 24 hours a day,” said Phil Hoover, who lives in Buffalo, Iowa, just downstream. “But now, it’s kind of, we’ve done what we can do and we have to sit and wait.”

Davenport officials breathed a premature sigh of relief Saturday morning, believing that the worst was over. But by late afternoon the weather service was calling for as much as a half-inch of rain through Monday. “If that happens, I can’t imagine what’ll happen to the river,” said Ron Fournier, spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers.

Along with millions of dollars in damage to businesses and houses, the flooding has also left hundreds of barges paralyzed along a 500-mile stretch of the river, along Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri.

President Clinton, who Friday night ordered federal disaster aid for communities in Wisconsin that have been pounded by the flooding, scheduled a visit here tonight to survey the damage.

In Davenport, last week’s events touched off another round in a debate over whether the city should build levees and seawalls--flood controls that city officials have rejected repeatedly since a devastating flood in 1965.

Opponents of the flood controls have contended that levees and seawalls would ruin the city’s picturesque riverfront, weakening tourism, which has become a prominent industry since the farming crisis of the 1980s. Others said they believe that the 1965 catastrophe would be the last this century.

“I think it’s a crock,” said Jerry Hardin, a longtime Davenport resident. “Something should have been done. When you see boats driving down your streets, it should tell you something.”

But Ted Taylor, who was helping friends attempt to save millions of dollars of machinery caught in a waterlogged warehouse, disagreed.

“From a cost-benefit standpoint, it makes sense not to” build a seawall, he said. “Nobody expected anything like this to happen again so soon. Nobody wanted to pay for something that they weren’t sure we’d ever need.”

What has rankled Davenport residents is not so much the hoisting of thousands of sandbags or the scurrying to remove equipment from business establishments. It is that they have had to do much more flood fighting than residents of nearby riverfront cities.

They look at neighboring Bettendorf, Iowa, which crafted plans for a dike system in 1968 and completed the project in 1989. A few Bettendorf neighborhoods have been flooded, but most of its riverfront businesses have suffered minimal damage.

At least twice in the past eight years, the Corps of Engineers has approached Davenport with flood-control plans, Fournier said. One plan, rejected in 1986, would have cost $41 million, with $11.7 million coming from the city and the rest from the federal government, the spokesman said.

Another proposal, scheduled to be brought before city officials next year, would cost $49.6 million, with $14.2 million from Davenport, Fournier said.

Downstream, where the river was still rising, residents of some rural communities in Illinois were evacuated Saturday. And in rural St. Charles County, Mo., some residents of flood-prone areas fled.