RIVER FORECAST GOOD NEWS FOR RESIDENTS AND RIVERFEST

The National Weather Service at St. Louis has forecast the river stage at Cape Girardeau will be below flood stage on June 18.

An official with the weather service said Wednesday the river didn't rise or fall for much of the day, maintaining a stage of 45.3 feet. He said the river only was expected to fall by a tenth of a foot today but the water should begin to recede a little more rapidly by the weekend with the current weather pattern.

By Saturday, the weather service said the river would be at 44.5 feet, still not low enough to open the two main downtown floodgates.

Officials with the Riverfest '95 committee would like to have both floodgates open before the event begins next weekend, but weather service officials were non-committal about the river stage for June 9, 10 or 11.

The river must fall by 10 feet for the gates on Water Street at Themis and Broadway to be opened. The two gates in the past have been important to Riverfest activities.

But the floodgate at Water and Broadway might be open for the event. The stage must be below 37.8 feet for that gate to be opened, according to statistics from the Main Street Levee District. The river stage must fall by eight feet in nine days for the gate to be opened.

"Right now we're hearing that there's a good chance that the gate at Broadway will be open," Riverfest '95 Chairman Mark Cook said, "but the other one at Themis will probably stay closed."

Cook said the closed floodgates might make the downtown activities a little more crowded, but he didn't think it would have a drastic, negative effect on the event.

"The only thing that was really a disappointment was that a replica of the Nina, Christopher Columbus' ship, was supposed to stop here," he said. "I think it's stuck in Louisiana somewhere because the river is closed."