New Year’s Outlook Grim for Midwest Flood Victims : Disaster: Many along Mississippi are rootless, unable to rebuild quickly. Red tape, lack of money are cited.

A solitary silver bell and a ragged strand of tinsel flutter from a telephone pole on Highway 96, a forlorn holiday greeting from a Mississippi River town facing a winter of dispossession.

Residents of the west central Illinois hamlet of Hull, like so many towns struggling to recover from the Mississippi’s devastation, had banked on mending their water-weathered lives by Christmas. If they could just make it through December, they told each other as they waited for the floodwaters to recede last summer, they would be back in renovated homes by the time the river froze.

Four months after succumbing to the river’s mute advance, the town is dry again, its tiny grid of blacktop roads passable, its power restored and its town services groaning back toward normalcy.

But for Hull’s residents, like thousands more living along the Mississippi, December may as well be July. No more than 30 of Hull’s 200 families will be back in their homes by year’s end. Those few are returning to a community that jolts alive in daylight hours to the drone of buzz saws and staccato of hammers, but silences at night as the majority of the town’s dislocated population retreats to temporary quarters.

“You look out the window and you can see how lonely it is at night,” said Mary Shirley, one of the few who, with her children, aims to return to her flood-ravaged home by Christmas. “Just a few lights here and there. The rest is so dark.”

Unable to rebuild quickly because of the lack of funds, government red tape and uncertainty about what to do with their water-rotted homes, many of the Mississippi’s flood victims will spend the winter in subsidized apartments and cramped government trailers.

More than 2,700 Illinois families will not be returning to their homes this winter, said Ron Sherman, deputy coordinator of the state’s Federal Emergency Management Agency office. And government and farm aid officials report that at least 10% of the flood victims in Illinois and Missouri are unable even to reach their homes because the dwellings are still submerged in water that will soon ice up.

With $105 million in federal funds recently earmarked by Congress for relocation, at least 200 towns and counties have notified FEMA of their interest in obtaining aid. Only one community, the devastated southern Illinois town of Valmeyer, has voted to move. Officials were to break ground on a new site this weekend.

Most other communities are like Hull, intent on rebuilding at their old site but reconciled to the realization that some residents will not be returning. Some, fearful of renewed spring floods and unnerved by the halting pace of flood aid, have already moved to higher ground, abandoning towns like Hull and the peaceful life they now mourn.

A block from the fraying Santa Claus decals pasted on Hull’s one-story brick City Hall, a husk of a house sits vacant, its front porch scrawled with red paint: “For Sale--CHEAP!”

“If we could get our old lives back, we’d go back in a minute,” said Chris Kroenke, who relocated to a hillside trailer overlooking Hull with her husband and two sons. “But we never will. So we left.”

The Kroenkes abandoned a farmhouse just south of Hull that had been lifted from its foundation by floodwaters and deposited 200 yards away. “It’s like that house in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” Kroenke said, flipping through snapshots of the wreckage. “All that’s missing is the witch underneath.”

Somewhere hidden inside the house, she said, were now-mangled boxes filled with the family’s Christmas decorations, collected over the years from relatives and friends.

“I guess we’ll get new ones,” she said, sighing. “But it won’t be the same.”

South of Hull, the Mississippi bottoms landscape appears like a page torn from a Salvador Dali sketchbook: Cornstalks droop from power lines 30 feet off the ground. Flatboats and fish corpses lay marooned in parched fields.

Brad and Carrie Bareis’ farmhouse sits ruined just south of Hull, an unrecognizable pancake of metal and wood. But their swimming pool, complete with wading ladder, came through unscathed.

“Perfect time of year for a dip,” Brad Bareis said. The manager of Hull’s grain storage works, Bareis still seemed freshly stunned as he picked through the ruins of his family’s life--a pink lamp, a television antenna, empty bottles of Dr. Pepper, his childhood bicycle.

The damage is more subtle inside town. Tall shrubs flower in majestic reds and greens seven feet above ground--the height of the floodwaters. Below that watermark, the vegetation is stunted and pale. Almost every home bears similar telltale scars. Mounds of water-logged debris grow ever larger on lawns denuded of grass.

Most homes in Hull escaped major structural damage, officials say, only because the mammoth 52-mile-long Sny Island levee was one of the last Mississippi flood barriers to breach. “The water was in Hull no longer than three weeks,” said Douglas Thompson, an official with the University of Illinois Cooperative Service. “It didn’t stay longer because the river level was falling when the levee broke.”

By contrast, levees in the Indian Graves and Lima Lake districts north of Hull broke earlier, allowing water to stand for up to two months in those farming communities. Almost all of the houses in the small town of Meyer were shredded by powerful currents that followed the Lima Lake breach.

The majority of the upper Mississippi’s federally certified levees have been repaired “well enough” to handle spring floods, said Ron Fournier, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Rock Island district. At least 28 of the 40 federal levees in the Rock Island district will be sound for next spring, Fournier said, including the Sny and most major neighboring levees.

But despite the structural soundness of most of the levees, few of Hull’s 200 houses will be occupied during the winter months. Many homeowners have decided to perform only essential rebuilding now, waiting until next spring to finish, fearing the possibility of renewed flooding. Others are still intrigued about the possibility of federal relocation assistance--although it is unlikely many will qualify for that aid if and when it comes.

“If we knew for certain there wouldn’t be any flood, or that our levee will hold, we’d be back in a minute,” said one Hull homeowner who declined to give his name. “But when you press these know-it-alls to the wall, not one of them will give you a guarantee. Well, I’ll be damned if I fix up my place only to go through this hell again.”

Those few who are working feverishly to return are going on faith. Mary Shirley is well aware of the danger of new floods. “But I wasn’t about to deprive my kids of Christmas in their own home,” she said.

Every day for more than a month, Shirley, her 14-year-old daughter, April, and her son, Robert, 12, have driven over from their FEMA trailer in New Canton, a dozen miles to the south, to work on the family homestead.

Although the house sits on Highway 96, the easternmost edge of the area covered by floodwater last summer, it still took on two feet of water above the basement. The water lapped there for three weeks, rotting out the wood-plank flooring downstairs, buckling the walls on the first floor, peeling the exterior paint and pressuring lower windows until they burst.

Unwilling to wait until the spring, Shirley applied for several church grants and managed to wangle one of the early low-interest Small Business Administration loans available to flooded-out homeowners.

She raised $18,000, enough--along with her own money--to pay for the bulk of the repairs. For the rest, she turned for aid to the dozens of volunteer groups that have swarmed over Hull in recent months.

On a recent Saturday, a dozen volunteers from a church in Bloomington, Ill., descended on the property to help with final repairs. They swabbed veneer on an old oak door and piled chunks of old floorboard in trash mounds. One man asked Shirley if there were any laws against burning debris. “Not in this town,” Shirley said. “Burn to your heart’s content.”

The refuse was carted together in a great pile and, moments later, Shirley’s front yard vanished under a pall of smoke.

The Shirleys were unable to have Thanksgiving in the house, but the children handled that well. “It’s Christmas that’s special,” Shirley said. “If we missed it, it would be the first time this house was vacant over the holidays since my folks bought it in ’61.”

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, local officials noticed that anger seemed to spark up among many of Hull’s residents--a sign of stress they expect to worsen over Christmas.

“The regular stress from the flood has been hard enough. The holidays can only make it tougher. And for some people, all winter will be hard,” said Dr. Richard Newman, a psychiatrist in nearby Quincy who has counseled flood victims in Hull and other towns.

“These are people who pride themselves on being self-sufficient,” he said. “But you can sense how hard it is for them. Community means a lot to them, and right now, they’re feeling terribly uprooted.”

Many blame federal and local officials, cursing regulations that prevent them from obtaining building permits to repair shattered residences unless they promise to build high enough to ride out future floods. Few homes inside Hull are affected by this stricture. But just outside town, where devastation is rampant, it means building houses up to 16 feet above current elevations.

“These people have a damn-the-torpedoes attitude; they want to get on with their lives,” said Blake Roderick, manager of the Pike County Farm Bureau. “They feel that the government is not taking them seriously.”

The town’s leaders have tried to take every available opportunity to remind Hull’s 517 residents, scattered as they are, of their old sense of cohesion. On Thanksgiving, missionaries from Arcola, Ill., roasted 20 25-pound turkeys and delivered them to Hull’s residents for a communal feast. A similar feast is planned for Christmas for those who have nowhere to go, said Carrie Bareis, who runs a volunteer food bank out of a local church hall.

As Christmas approaches, Hull’s children already have been plied with enough gifts to stock a small toy store. Volunteers recently piled crates filled with slot-car sets, Ninja Turtles and basketballs in Hull’s shuttered elementary school for a toy giveaway. Each child who showed up walked out with three presents.

An hour later, more than 100 children wedged into P.L.’s Place, the town’s only restaurant, to cart off more gifts. They stood in line to gorge on cookies and reveal their gift wishes to Hull Mayor Dave Lehr, who showed up in a matted false beard and Santa Claus costume.

Off in a corner, surrounded by Mennonite volunteers disguised as Smurfs, Chris Kroenke sat with her two boys, Joel, 8, and Shawn, 4. Like the rest of the town’s children, the boys were immersed in their new playthings, oblivious to the future.

Like most of the adults who sat and watched their children play, Kroenke could think of nothing else.

“It really makes you feel good that people remember us,” she said. “But are they going to remember next year, or the year after that? And if more families like us leave, is there going to be anyone left to remember?”