Rising Midwest Rivers Chase Hundreds From Their Homes

The Meramec River surged higher Thursday, threatening an interstate highway, and some residents driven from their homes for the third time in a year waited out the high water at a church shelter.

“You wrap your lifetime around a house,” said Jim Thayer, who has lived here since 1953. “But it’s getting so expensive to rebuild that a lot of people are going to have to give up.”

Midwestern rivers fattened on snowmelt and fed by days of spring rains flowed out of their banks this week, forcing people from their homes and reviving memories of last summer’s devastating floods.

The flooding has been blamed for four deaths in Missouri and one each in Illinois and Oklahoma.

Thayer and his neighbors, who took shelter at Sacred Heart Church, cheered when they heard that the National Weather Service had downgraded its crest prediction for the Meramec. Instead of cresting at 39 feet today, it topped out at 37.4 feet Thursday night--21 feet above flood stage.

The Meramec has already forced about 1,000 people--one-fourth of the town--from their homes and threatened to sweep over Interstate 44, which slices diagonally across the state from Springfield northeast to St. Louis.

In southern Illinois, several families were plucked to safety by helicopter after the Mississippi River pushed through a levee near Miller City. Hours earlier, crews had finished adding 10 feet to the levee to reinforce it.

In Prairie du Rocher in southwestern Illinois, residents piled sandbags atop a levee holding back the Kaskaskia River.

“I just don’t want our house to get flooded again,” said Erin Huntley, a high school freshman.

The retreating Embarras River left a slimy, brown mixture of mud, water, gasoline and oil coating the streets of Villa Grove in east-central Illinois.

More than half of the town’s 1,000 homes were flooded, and the water supply was tainted. On Main Street, residents filled jugs from a 1,200-gallon tank of drinking water perched on a trailer.

Illinois officials called up 150 members of the National Guard and another 1,000 were on standby.

In St. Louis, the Mississippi River crested at 6.5 feet over flood stage.