BAD NEWS: MORE RAIN MAY RAISE CREST

The National Weather Service is calling for 2 to 5 inches of rain north of Cape Girardeau in the next two days, a forecast that could wreak havoc with today's scheduled Mississippi River crest of 47 feet.

If there is no rain in Kansas, Nebraska, southwestern Iowa and northwest Missouri in the next 24 hours, the river will drop in Cape Girardeau to 45.8 feet on Thursday and 44 feet shortly thereafter.

However, the forecast is calling for rainfall in Southeast Missouri by Thursday night with flash flooding over the weekend.

The forecast was bad news for those in the Dutchtown and Commerce areas, where residents either spent the day evacuating their homes or hoping their levee wouldn't break.

Missouri National Guard troops were expected to arrive Tuesday night to patrol the almost deserted town.

At Commerce, a steady stream of pickup trucks, cars and vehicles pulling trailers filed from the town with furniture and stuffed animals Tuesday.

The U.S. Coast Guard spent the day checking on people stranded by the flood and ferrying people across the watery landscape.

By Tuesday night, most of the town's 180 residents had fled to safety.

At Dutchtown, officials were optimistic but concerned about the wind that caused the water to pound against the levee, saturating much of the rock forming the barrier between dry homes and four feet of water.

Wind gusts reached 25 miles an hour at the Cape Girardeau Regional Airport during the afternoon Tuesday, causing waves to whitecap on what looked like a large lake but was actually flooded farmland.

"We're doing the best we can at keeping the water out of here," said an engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Corps officials walked the levee checking for seepage and requesting more rock and plastic where they thought it was needed.

The National Guard is expected to be at Commerce about a week, Scott County Civil Defense Director Joe Burton said.

Burton and Commerce Board of Trustees Chairman Roy Jones spent Tuesday advising residents to pack up their belongings and leave.

And by late afternoon, a narrow gravel road offered the only entrance and exit to the town but it, too, was threatened by the floodwaters.

Construction equipment was brought in to fashion a temporary road.

Viola Smith, who runs the Dutchtown convenience store, took precautionary steps in the afternoon by stacking her goods three feet off the floor "just in case."

"I don't know if the levee's going to give or not," she said, "they said they had some problems -- but if we would have had more smarts, we would've done this earlier anyway."

She doesn't have faith in the levee this time "compared to the fortress we built in '93."

Some 20 volunteers filled sandbags and stacked them on the makeshift levee.

Since last Thursday, about 60,000 sandbags have been arrayed around Commerce homes, making them look like forts. Some 80 to 100 truckloads of sand have been used in fighting the flood.

Even so, Burton said the river is winning the battle. "You can't keep it back," he said.

The Cape Girardeau County Commission closed Highway 74 just east of Dutchtown at Highway 61, which leads to the Diversion Channel boat launch and a Union Electric substation.

Additional roads were closed or restricted in the area including Big Bend, Chestnut, Fourth and Fifth streets in Cape Girardeau.