By Oren Dorell
USA TODAY
Caption: Volunteers, including people from the county jail, unload sand bags from boats to shore up a levee Saturday, June 21, 2008 north of Foley, Mo.
FOLEY, Mo. — A dozen volunteers and anxious residents stood ankle deep in mud Sunday evening, piling sandbags around a tiny spring in a levee. The leak threatens the last barrier between this small farming community and the raging Mississippi, which will likely crest Monday night.
It is a scene all too familiar in state after state along the swollen rivers in six Midwestern states.
(AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) |
“When the water’s really high, it starts to build up pressure, and it starts finding gopher holes and groundhog holes (in the earthen levee), and that’s when you start having problems,” says Richard Hahn, whose father, Dale, heads the Sandy Creek Levee District.
The Hahns farm corn and beans on more than half the 1,000 acres of bottomland around Foley. They know what hangs in the balance. Once the levees are breached, “there’s nothing you can do to stop (the water),” he says.
Nearby, other sandbagging teams worked on a handful of other “boils,” weaknesses in the earthen barriers. A mile downstream, Lincoln County inmates dressed in black-and-white-striped jumpsuits mixed with volunteer firefighters, farmers and out-of-towners, unloading truck after truck of sandbags and tossing them on flat-bottom boats to reinforce hard-to-reach parts of the levee.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: St. Louis | Mississippi | National Weather Service | Midwestern | John Deere | Dale | Lincoln County | St. Peters | Donna Smith | Winfield High School
In Winfield High School, hundreds of volunteers have been filling sandbags for days.
“If this levee goes, these farms will be destroyed,” says Jerry Henke, 25, a volunteer in the Winfield-Foley Fire Department who works for another farmer in the valley. “If that happens, I won’t have a job this fall. I won’t have anything to bring in.”
Work on the levee has continued almost non-stop over the past few days, Hahn said. The 46-year-old farmer got up at 4 a.m. Saturday to check known soft spots in the levee and didn’t stop until 8 p.m.
“We think we’re going to hold as long as we don’t have a big rain close by,” he said as he drove a John Deere tractor through deep ruts across a field with a pallet of sandbags for workers attacking the levee.
Among them is Jessyka Mullen, 31, a former airline attendant who recently moved to St. Peters, a suburb of St. Louis. She said she saw the sandbagging campaign on television news and “couldn’t think of any reason to not come and help.”
Don Dueing, 45, loaded sandbags on his flat-bottomed boat until water lapped over the front as he motored along Sandy Creek levee. His home in Foley is protected for now, but he remembers the flood of 1993, when water went over his roof.
Dueing maneuvered his boat beneath low-hanging power lines and through a gap in the pin oaks that he says marks the road to the river. Along the way, he checked on a couple who have stayed in their house built on steel stilts. It is one of the last houses before the Mississippi, and they are sticking around to guard against looters. Fifteen years ago, thieves in boats ransacked homes that had been evacuated, Dueing says.
In Winfield, about 4 miles downstream from Foley, the Mississippi was at 35.7 feet Sunday evening and rising, according to the National Weather Service. In some places it has already broken through.
John Watson, 49, a roofing contractor, removed his carpet, baseboards, kitchen cabinets and all his appliances as a precaution and is sleeping in a tent on the roof with a shotgun.
His wife, Donna Smith, 46, is staying with her brother on higher ground. She stopped by with her teenage children for a visit. With tears in her eyes, she stands in the barren living room looking at water licking the steps of her neighbor’s porch.
“This is devastating,” she says, anxious about her husband being there all alone. “It’s a terrible waiting game.”
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