Midwest Braces for New Round of Rain, Floods : Disaster: Army Corps trucks drinking water to Des Moines area. Scuba divers work on city power stations.

As workers furiously sought to restore water service here and reinforce hundreds of miles of levees throughout the weary, wet Midwest Monday, the region braced for another round of heavy rains on the swollen upper reaches of the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

Des Moines residents stood in line at shopping malls and supermarkets, water jugs in hand, as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers trucked in drinking water after the Raccoon River overran the municipal treatment plant on Sunday, cutting off service to more than 250,000 people.

L.D. McMullen, general manager of the Des Moines Water Works, said water for bathing and boiling hopefully would be restored by Sunday but that drinking water from the tap would not be available for 30 days.

Meanwhile, thousands of workers furiously sandbagged a second water treatment plant in West Des Moines, where some residential neighborhoods remained covered with up to six feet of water.

A local utility sent scuba divers into flooded power stations--an effort that restored electricity in scattered locations.

During the flooding that took out the first water plant, manhole covers clanged into the air, propelled by the rising water table. By Monday, there was silence under a clear sky. The outfield at the minor league baseball stadium was a lake. Downtown, where 60,000 people usually work, was closed.

“What a quiet devastation this is,” said Carol Baumgarten, general manager of the venerable Hotel Savery.

Even under the sun, levees throughout the region continued to fail and the floodwaters rolled on. Workers imported from West Virginia to Louisiana patrolled hundreds of miles of earthen berms through Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, bulldozing the sides and erecting plywood fences along the tops, trying every way they knew to prepare for the next onslaught.

“It’s supposed to start all over again,” said Ron Fournier, a Corps of Engineers spokesman in Rock Island, Ill. “We’re preparing for the worst.”

The epic floods and rains have already caused more than 20 deaths since late last month, and total damage is estimated at more than $2 billion. The Upper Mississippi Flood Assn., which covers drainage districts from south of Quincy, Ill., to Muscatine, Iowa, the repair bill so far for broken levees stands at $330 million. Tens of thousands of people are homeless, and ground transportation is hobbled throughout the region.

The American Red Cross estimated that more than 7,600 homes have been damaged or destroyed in Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois. It said it had 52 shelters open.

On Monday, there was plenty for Vice President Al Gore to take in as he boated and helicoptered around tiny Grafton, Ill., where the Mississippi snakes to the east before curving south to St. Louis.

Gore shook his head as he surveyed submerged houses from the air. “That is so sad,” he said. “You can’t even tell where the Mississippi begins and the farmland ends.”

The flooding was widespread along the Iowa River east of Des Moines. The town of Amana defended its refrigerator factory. The University of Iowa closed some buildings in Iowa City.

Just north of Quincy, at Indian Grave, the Mississippi seeped through a sand levee in the early morning hours, rolling over 8,000 acres of corn and soybeans. On the Missouri side, two other levees surrendered at Palmyra and south of La Grange. Each ceded about 4,000 acres of farmland to the river.

“This dadgone water is not gonna go down for 30 days,” said Russell Miller, a farmer who lives north of Indian Grave near the small town of Ursa.

A no-fly zone was established north of St. Louis to Quincy, so that helicopters could rescue stranded residents from rooftops.

In St. Louis itself, where 52-foot-high floodgates protect most of the city, the river spilled into parking areas and a garage at the Laclede’s Landing entertainment district.

The Mississippi was actually receding, about 3/10ths of a foot, in the Quad Cities area of northeast Iowa and northwest Illinois, where health authorities in hard-hit Davenport were warning that 200 to 250 wells may be contaminated by sewage. Near the Iowa-Missouri border, at Keokuk, the river fell 1/10th of a foot.

But “the Midwest will stay under the gun for another 48 hours,” warned Jim Henderson, deputy director of the National Weather Service Severe Storms Forecast Center, based in Kansas City, Mo. Two to three inches of precipitation are expected during that time. If it comes, the creeks will rise. The storms will feed the Missouri River from one end of Missouri to the other.

It will all end up, of course, in the Mississippi.

Meteorologists held out one small measure of hope: By the end of the week, the rains should shift further north, to Minnesota, where at least it will take more time to reach the sodden ground downstream.

The good news, said Dean Jones, a meteorologist for WeatherData Inc., a Wichita-based consultant that provides forecasts for The Times, is that “we’re getting more into hurricane season and more disturbances across the center half of the U.S. may weaken the high front that has kept this rain in place.”

For the immediate future, worry centers on such vulnerable points as the Bayview Bridge at Quincy, the only crossing over the river for more than 200 miles, and Kaskaskia Island, “a large island with a very, very small town and a big levee around it,” said Jim Brown, a spokesman for the Corps in St. Louis.

The bridge itself is high enough to withstand the flooding, but the access road that leads up to it could wash out, said Mike Klingner, a private civil engineer who has worked with several drainage districts to save rural levees over the past week.

The Sny Island levee, 52 miles long, is another concern, Klingner said. The nation’s second-longest levee, it protects 110,000 acres of farmland. Night winds have blown straw and plastic from the levee top, but it has held so far.

South of St. Louis, in historic Ste. Genevieve, sandbagging continued while residents remained optimistic that their collection of vertical-log French colonial buildings will stay dry. Adjacent areas have flooded, Brown said.

On Monday, Gore promised that federal disaster assistance centers will soon open in Grafton, Quincy, Rock Island and East Dubuque, Ill. Individual grants of up to $12,000, he said, should be available in a week or less.

Flood-damaged areas of Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin already have been designated federal disaster areas eligible for low-interest loans. President Clinton visited flood-stricken Davenport, which never built a levee, on the way to the economic summit in Tokyo last week.

The troubles at Des Moines showed just how wide a stretch is covered by the Midwest watershed. At the confluence of the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers, Iowa’s largest city is 170 miles from the Mississippi.

On Monday, National Guard troops and city employees rushed to take down 10-foot barricades set up for the Greater Des Moines Grand Prix car race over the weekend so that sandbags could be piled in their place. The convention center was sandbagged, too.

Portable toilets were being trucked all over town.

Even the governor’s official residence was waterless and powerless.

At the Hotel Savery, Baumgarten’s staff was taking water from the pool and spa to keep the place clean. The guests were gone, so there was enough to drink--an employee bought 61 gallons of bottled water on the way back from a trip to the north part of the state.

“When I need a shower,” Baumgarten said, “I go out to the suburbs” where a friend has offered use of a bathroom.

High schools in West Des Moines, where the water still runs from the taps, are also offering up showers and swimming pools to help cleanse the city populace.