2 Holes Blasted in Levee Appear to Save Town

It looked Wednesday like the people beat the river.

They gambled. They punched a hole in a levee. Then they gambled again. They dynamited two more holes. Finally, in a risk that seemed crazy, they dug the two holes bigger.

In the end, their hydraulic wizardry drew floodwater from the Mississippi River away from Prairie du Rocher, an 18th-Century French settlement that is home to 602 people. The wizardry ruined 50 farmhouses and flooded 47,000 acres of cropland. But it appeared to have saved the town.

“It seems to be holding the water off,” said Dan Reitz, chairman of the governing board for Randolph County, which includes Prairie du Rocher. “It’s not rising any more.” For one night, said Dale Phegley, the Prairie du Rocher police chief, “it looked like we’d lost it. But we hung in there, and today I think we’re going to make it.”

If Prairie du Rocher does make it, this triumph will be more than a conquest. It will be a symbolic victory. The Midwest has endured two months of flooding. Forty-seven people have died. Damage estimates range to $15 billion. This will mean that in what could be one of the last big showdowns of the summer between people and nature, the people won.

In St. Louis, upstream from here, officials decided not to burn the propane from five tanks still in danger of floating loose down the Mississippi. Instead, Phillips Petroleum, which owns the tanks, will vent the three that seem to be the most dangerous. Residents in the area were told they would have to stay away from their homes awhile longer.

Across the river from here and a bit downstream, residents in St. Genevieve, Mo., sandbagged their levees and watched with apprehension as Prairie du Rocher seemed to survive. If Prairie du Rocher flooded, officials said, it would relieve pressure on the river and drop the level of the water against the levees at St. Genevieve, some of which might be eroding.

Prairie du Rocher

The battle for historic Prairie du Rocher began Tuesday, when its officials realized that a flow of renegade floodwater running south outside the banks of the Mississippi was headed straight toward town.

They took their first gamble.

First with bulldozers and then with a crane on a barge, they tore a 200-foot-long breach in a levee along the river three miles to the north, turning loose a flow of floodwater to the east. They hoped that it would intersect the southbound flow, deflect it and slow it down.

The decision was agonizing. The eastward flow would cover the farm homes and valuable cropland. And it might fail to divert the southbound flow and simply add to the floodwater threatening the town. Some in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called the action unusual, perhaps unprecedented. But the Corps recommended the breach anyway.

Farmers complained. But officials pointed out that their homes and crops would be flooded by the southbound flow in any case. When the bulldozers and the crane opened the levee, some of the farmers reacted angrily. As the man-made flood rolled eastward, it covered their legacies and family fortunes.

Worse, the gamble was not a terribly good one. When the eastward flow reached the southbound current, it did less deflecting than it might have. The two floods rolled together. And together they barreled on south--toward Prairie du Rocher.

As the combined flow neared, townspeople, National Guard troops and hundreds of volunteers worked feverishly to shore up an earthen flood wall that runs east and west across the northern edge of town. But water poured against the wall at 26,000 cubic feet per second. Town trustees feared that the wall would be topped and that Prairie du Rocher, with its 1700s-era homes built by the French, would disappear.

They sounded sirens and ordered a general evacuation. Overnight, with the town virtually empty, the floodwater accumulated behind the wall. It rose dangerously. In time, the water climbed higher than the Mississippi.

As it neared the top of the wall, the town elders of Prairie du Rocher took their second big gamble.

With earth-rattling charges of dynamite, they blasted two more holes through the levee along the Mississippi. They touched off one blast at 3:50 a.m. Wednesday and the other at 5:30 a.m. The dynamite broke windows and triggered car alarms in St. Genevieve.

More important, it opened gaps 50 feet wide and 10 feet wide in the Mississippi levee.

These gaps were downstream from their first breach and much closer to the protective flood wall. Since the floodwater accumulating behind the wall had climbed higher than the Mississippi, and since water flows downward, the idea was to give it openings to drain back into the river.

That technique was not so unusual, said Gary Dyhouse, chief hydrologist for the Corps of Engineers in St. Louis. But the Corps opposed using dynamite. The bulldozers and crane would be better, engineers said, for two very big reasons:

* Darkness made the dynamite dangerous.

* The levee was entirely saturated. Shock waves, said Col. James Craig, might make it “liquefy and disappear.”

When local officials took the risk anyway, Reitz, the county board chairman, defended it vigorously. “The decision to blast was made only because the water was rising so rapidly,” he said. “We had to get it back into the Mississippi River as fast as it was coming in. We just basically felt we had no other choice.”

The Mississippi levee did not disappear, and the two holes helped. But officials said the dynamite did not make the holes big enough.

So they took another risk.

Shortly after dawn they put cranes to work enlarging the holes that the dynamite had made.

Scoop by scoop, the cranes fashioned a cut in the levee that was 2,000 feet long. And by midafternoon, Reitz announced that the cut seemed to be working.

As water poured in from the Mississippi at the upstream breach, then joined the renegade southbound flow and reached the Prairie du Rocher flood wall at 26,000 cubic feet per second, another 26,000 cubic feet per second was barreling out through the cut and back into the river.

The water at the flood wall had stabilized--only six inches below the top. But the level had in fact stabilized.

And now, Reitz said, workers could dam the original, upstream breach in the Mississippi levee, enlarge the 2,000-foot downstream cut even more--and perhaps empty the Prairie du Rocher bottom land entirely.

Police Chief Phegley expressed amazement at the outpouring of help from hundreds of volunteers, including striking miners in Kentucky, who converged on Prairie du Rocher to save it from destruction.

Their determination in working with local residents and merchants seemed dauntless.

Town trustees pointed proudly to a small plaque put up last year outside the Prairie du Rocher community center proclaiming: “We have tenaciously clung to our heritage at the foot of these bluffs since 1722.”

But many of the farmers whose rich, fertile bottom land was washed out and whose homes were destroyed were unhappy--even bitter--about everything that had happened.

Ed and Carol DuFrenn, for example, had farmed for 32 years north of Prairie du Rocher. But now their two-story home and 100 acres were underwater. They said that their livelihood had been sacrificed to save the town--and that they were never given a say in the matter.

“We’re bitter. We’re mad,” Carol DuFrenn said. “I love Prairie du Rocher. Some of my people live there. But we woke up in the morning and watched them cutting that levee on TV.

“You know, you can rebuild a home in the city if it gets flooded. But when water rushes over your farm and your topsoil, then your whole farm and livelihood is gone.”

St. Louis

To the north, in St. Louis, officials decided against a controlled burn of propane from five Phillips Petroleum Co. tanks that were still in danger of floating out of control down the Mississippi. Forty-six other tanks have been returned to their cradles since the river knocked them loose last weekend.

Company officials, firefighters and consultants said a controlled burn would be too risky. Instead, they said, Phillips would vent propane from three of the most dangerous tanks--90,000 gallons in all. This meant that residents evacuated from a 100-square-block area around the Phillips plant would have to stay away for several more days.

Criticism of the company grew more heated, and some evacuees talked of suing. Police arrested a third resident for re-entering the evacuation area. No looting has been reported.

“This could have been prevented,” said Sandy Heet, who ran a day-care center out of her home until she was forced to flee. “You can’t prevent a flood, but the company could have been prepared.”

Phillips said it would double a $40,000 donation to relief agencies to help defray costs for those who had to leave home.

St. Genevieve

In St. Genevieve, local residents and volunteers who worked feverishly for a month to shore up their levee with limestone hoped to keep the river out when it was expected to crest sometime today.

Over the last several weeks, they had built a wall of sand, gravel and sandbags to protect the downtown section of the community--the first permanent European settlement west of the Mississippi.

Behind the wall are 40 homes and other buildings, including some built in the 1700s.

“St. Genevieve has built an emergency levee but it’s of dubious quality,” said Gary Dyhouse, chief hydrologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in St. Louis. “They’ve been trying to save their town for days and have been working hard at it.

“But anytime you have an emergency like this that lasts as long as this, you’re going to have some erosion and other problems that will cause seepage to begin . . . .

“If the Prairie du Rocher levees fail altogether,” Dyhouse said, “then the river levels would drop and that could save St. Genevieve.”

Despite this fact, many residents of St. Genevieve cheered for their neighbors across the Mississippi.

Deciding to breach the river levee “could change the whole concept of flood fighting,” said Jean Rissover, the St. Genevieve spokeswoman.

“It took a lot of guts.”

Times staff writers Louis Sahagun in St. Louis and Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles contributed to this story.