Residents pile ruined furniture, appliances, and clothes along the street for disposal crews to pick up after last week’s flooding from the south fork of the Sangamon River on Sunday in Kincaid, Ill.
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Two more levees succumbed Friday, bringing the number of levee failures along its course to at least 11.
“It’s nearly as if you’re living on some other planet”, said Missouri Governor Jay Nixon as he stood on a mound of debris in the devastated town of Eureka, about an hour’s drive west of St. Louis.
In Pacific, one of several hard-hit towns southwest of St Louis, about 20 people lined up at a police checkpoint in the morning, home-inspection papers in hand, anxiously waiting to learn whether they would be allowed back in to see what was left.
Alexander County Board Chairman Chalen Tatum said sandbagging efforts were cut off because it was too risky for the volunteers.
The river surge is expected to hit areas further downstream with flooding, such as Memphis, Tenn.
“I didn’t believe it was going to get like this”, he told CNN on Saturday. Searchers were still looking for five missing people – two teenagers in IL, two men in Missouri and a country music singer in Oklahoma.
The body of 18-year-old Devan Everett was found Friday.
Illinois National Guard has been activated to help local authorities especially in the south of the state. In Missouri, Nixon planned stops in Eureka and Cape Girardeau.
The main culprit in the St. Louis region was the Meramac River, a relatively small MS tributary.
In St. Louis, the river crested Friday at 42.58 feet – just shy of the 1993 level. Two wastewater-treatment plants were so damaged by the floodwaters that raw sewage spewed into the river.
Several thousand people were forced to evacuate or suffered damage to their homes, hundreds of businesses also sustained damage and hundreds of water rescues were conducted, according to Nixon. Valley Park used its Facebook page to advise residents Friday that the evacuation order was lifted, and the city of Arnold’s Facebook page urged residents to watch out for snakes in flooded homes. He said the worst of the inundation appeared to be past, “until the new weather comes”, citing the prospect of potentially heavy rain later in the week. Mitchell Elementary kindergarten teacher Amanda Wilson teaches kids at the Hope Lutheran Church shelter how to play the Go Fish card game in Pontoon Beach, Ill., on Friday, Jan. 1, 2016.
Flood warnings were also in effect for parts of Texas, Oklahoma, the Carolinas, Alabama and Kentucky, the NWS said, while major flooding was occurring on the Arkansas River and its tributaries in that state. “You have nowhere else to go”.
Missouri governor Jay Nixon said the overflow off the MS would overtake the records set by “the great flood of 1993”, which killed 50 people, broke hundreds of levees and caused thousands to flee their homes.
“What we’d like people to know is that, in Cape Girardeau, there have been so many precautions in place that even given the magnitude of this event, it’s really gone remarkably well for us”, Molly Hood, Cape Girardeau’s deputy city manager, said on Saturday.
“It’s still a very significant flood”, he said Saturday.
The Mississippi River in Osceola is at MAJOR flood stage at 37.04 feet.
The river will not be as high as it was when we encountered historical flooding in 2011, but we are expecting minor to moderate flooding in most of the areas along the Mississippi River through next weekend.
Several states between Ohio River and eastern Oklahoma have been contending with torrents of water that are unusual during the winter season, the National Weather Service said.
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Hundreds of miles to the south, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the river is expected to crest above flood stage on January 19.
