Residents Wait, Pray Town Levees Will Hold : Flood: Dikes protecting historic Ste. Genevieve from the Mississippi River are leaking. Elsewhere, the deluge appears to be easing.

People sandbagged, held their breath and prayed Thursday as the Mississippi River passed this old French town at high flood. Its levees were leaking, and one official said it was like the eighth inning in a no-hitter.

“No one wants to say we are dry,” said the official, David Angerer, a city administrator, “and then the next day the levee breaks.”

At 6 p.m. local time, the Mississippi crested at 49.43 feet against the levees, which are 50 feet high--51 feet in places. But the dikes were leaking in spots. Sandy Koller, a local planning commissioner who reported the crest, added quietly that it looked like a long night.

Many residents had fled, and volunteers worked frantically, round the clock, trying to plug all the leaks. A local radio station called for more help. “The response has been tremendous,” Angerer said. He said people came from as far away as St. Louis, more than 40 miles upriver.

Elsewhere, floods throughout the Midwest seemed to be easing. The death toll stood at 48. Damage has been estimated at up to $15 billion. Scattered showers are forecast for today in Missouri, along with sometimes-heavy thundershowers. But there seemed to be no sign of another lengthy period of sustained, heavy rain.

In Prairie du Rocher, Ill., a risky hydraulic system of deliberate breaches in a levee along the Mississippi continued to lower the pressure of tons of water against a flood wall. Upstream in St. Louis, there were no reports of trouble during the venting of propane tanks knocked loose by the flood.

Most attention, however, was focused on Ste. Genevieve. “The water’s been standing behind these levees for a month or more, and they’re weakened,” said Jean Rissover, a spokeswoman for the town. “There are no guarantees they will hold. If one leak gets too big, it’s over.”

Ste. Genevieve

In Ste. Genevieve, volunteers poured in from miles around. Some came from surrounding communities, including Flat River and Farmington.

Others included a man from British Columbia, who saw flood damage on television and drove all the way from Canada to help. Still another was a young man bicycling across the country, who detoured into town to fill sandbags.

“All city employees and those from the county have worked every day, 13-15 hours at a time, since July 1,” said Angerer, the city administrator. “Not a single day off. Every time we think we can give them a day off, something else occurs.

“And it’s not just the people working on the levees. We have clergymen, volunteers, elected officials, retired folks, who have spent whole days working on fork-lifts.”

The disruption seemed never ending, something extremely unusual for this 18th-Century French-style hamlet of antique shops, country inns and homes built in the 1770s. It is one of the oldest European settlements west of the Mississippi.

It has 4,400 residents.

The Red Cross offered food and clothing to evacuees. It also helped feed volunteers and members of the National Guard.

“This disaster is different than other disasters because of the length of time involved,” said Elaine Clyburn, a Red Cross district director in Cape Girardeau, Mo., which has jurisdiction over Ste. Genevieve.

It also is different, she said, because few of the displaced were staying in shelters, but instead with friends and family.

Prairie du Rocher

In Prairie du Rocher, residents stayed dry for a second day after fighting a chancy and heroic battle to save their town.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, they broke a levee in two places with dynamite and a crane, creating a system of hydraulics that drew floodwater away from town and dumped it back into the Mississippi.

By Thursday, the floodwater was receding, and a flood wall protecting homes and businesses seemed to be holding.

In the process, however, scores of farm homes were lost--as many as 100, by one estimate. Tens of thousands of acres of prime cropland were covered with water, in part because of the hydraulic system of levee holes that saved the town.

Some farmers were bitter. But others were willing to make the sacrifice.

“Now I can say they did the right thing because they saved the town,” Bob Dow told Reuters news service. “If we had lost the farms and the town, maybe I wouldn’t feel that way.”

Dave Chandler, who runs the only gas station still operating in Prairie du Rocher, said it would take the rest of his life for the town to return to normal.

“We had only 600 residents,” he said. “The question is: How many of them are going to come back?”

Lacey reported from Ste. Genevieve; Salem from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Richard E. Meyer also contributed to this story.