A Wet Row to Hoe in Midwest

Day by day, almost hour by hour, Deidre Johnson can look out her office window and watch the mighty, muddy Mississippi River slosh over its bank and slurp up first the curb, then the street, then the first few broad steps leading to the Gateway Arch.

“It’s like the river is taking over,” said Johnson, who sells riverboat cruises. “That’s what it looks like. Like the river is swallowing everything up.”

Well, not quite everything.

At least, not yet.

The flooding here is minimal compared with the disaster of 1993, when levees burst all along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, swamping town after town. This year’s version of the spring flood has the Mississippi due to crest in St. Louis on Thursday at 371/2 feet--enough to flood some roads, farms and basements, but still 12 feet below the record crest of ’93.

While the Mississippi is manageable, smaller creeks throughout the Midwest have surged dangerously in recent days as storms have pounded an already-soggy region.

Tremendous thunder booms have shaken houses like mini- earthquakes, tornado sirens have wailed through muggy midnights, and lightning bolts have cleaved the sky with such force that it sometimes feels as though no structure could possibly stand up to a storm that ferocious.

At least three people have died in the flooding.

A man drowned Monday in Bollinger County in southeast Missouri when floodwaters swept away his pickup truck. In rural Ironton, Mo., on Sunday, a man was swept from a tree he had climbed to escape a local creek turned raging river. And in a suburb of Cleveland, a man was killed when his raft plunged over a dam on the rushing, log-choked Chagrin River.

Heavy rains drenched the drought-stricken Northeast, helping replenish depleted reservoirs from New York City to Boston, forecasters at the Weather Channel said. Rain also soaked part of the Rocky Mountain region this weekend but not enough to affect the area’s four-year drought.

The forecast, meanwhile, calls for more rain in the Midwest starting Thursday and continuing through the weekend.

That’s especially bad news for farmers, who have not been able to get out into their fields. Illinois growers, for instance, have planted just 30% of their corn crop and 1% of their soybeans. Normally, by this time of year, they would have seeded at least 85% of their corn and 30% of the beans.

“There’s nothing being grown,” said Ron Marshel, who manages the Fayette and Bond County Farm Bureaus in north-central Illinois. Some fields, he said, are under 10 feet of standing water, because of the overflowing Kaskaskia River and ruptures in seven levees. The farmers who work that land will be lucky to get into their fields a month from now, Marshel said.

By then, it will be too late to plant corn. And soybeans planted so close to summer may produce a skimpy harvest. Some farmers hold insurance to cover lost income from acres too wet to plant. Others can only pray for sun.

“They’re trying to keep a stiff upper lip,” Marshel said. “But the mood is quite down.”

It’s equally grim over in Ellettsville, Ind., a small town just west of Bloomington where the Police Department flooded--again.

The creek through town swelled. The storm sewers backed up. And late Sunday night, mucky water started punching through the drains in the department’s concrete floors. Geysers three feet high shot up, dousing computers and desks. By morning, the detectives’ offices were under 14 inches of water.

Police Chief Ron McGlocklin has seen at least one flood a year since he started work at the department in 1981. The deluges are predictable. There’s nothing at all to be done about them, except move to higher ground, which is hard in a low-lying community such as Ellettsville. “This whole town sits in a flood plain,” McGlocklin said. Other towns in flood plains have learned from the trauma of 1993. Federal buyouts of homes and businesses that were submerged in the flood have helped to move people out of danger. Levees have been strengthened and new floodgates have been built.

In Grafton, Ill., along the Mississippi River, antique store owner Pam Bick spent a mercifully dry Monday hauling stuff out of her basement. While the river is not expected to crest at a devastating level, it will likely be high enough to creep into some homes.

So, Bick sorts and she carries and she scrambles to find room on her porch for a basement’s worth of stuff, in a routine she has honed to an art, flood after flood.

“I always think of it as a hurry-up spring cleaning,” she said. “You have to keep your sense of humor.”