Southern Illinois locked in battle with two rivers

OLIVE BRANCH, Ill. -- The river is winning.

For the flood fighters who spent three days trying to save the Mel Grah subdivision in this small Southern Illinois farming community, the water began to feel like an aggressive cancer of the land, its appetite insatiable.

Karen Jones, of nearby Miller City, Ill., is one of hundreds of volunteers furiously working to save what remains dry of Olive Branch, where much of the unincorporated community of about 900 residents sandwiched between the swollen Mississippi and Ohio rivers is under water.

Jones and Olive Branch resident Carmen Birk filled hundreds of sandbags between Monday and Thursday in a desperate fight to stop the rising floodwater from submerging the subdivision and its nearly 30 homes.

A levee designed to protect the community gave out Thursday night.

"It's devastating, to work and then," Jones pauses, "and then you're just so sad for all the people back there."

She's lived through the worst flood she could remember, the one in 1993 -- the big one to a lot of people in the region. This one, says Jones, makes '93 look easy.

"This is worse. It's epic," she said as she helped fill sandbags Friday to save the home of an Egyptian School District principal."This is slow-rising. You can just slowly see your life go away."

Fighting both sides of the river

The flood fighters line the flank of Illinois Route 3, from the outskirts of Olive Branch up to the Horseshoe Lake Community Center. They wear their fatigue on their faces, working alongside family, friends, neighbors, complete strangers, in what, at times, must feel like a Quixotic campaign. But giving up, it seems, is not in the language of these Southern Illinois river towns.

That's why many say they don't understand the thinking of some of their Southeast Missouri neighbors who have criticized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plan to detonate the Birds Point levee in Mississippi County, Mo., a plan some have asserted is meant to save flood-threatened Cairo, Ill. The corps has said operating the floodway, which would wash out 133,000 acres of farmland and destroy about 100 homes, is meant to relieve the powerful pressure of historically high water levels up and down the river system -- all the way to New Orleans.

Jones agrees.

"It's not just about Cairo. This whole county is affected," she said of her Alexander County.

Many in the river valleys beyond the floodway believe blowing up the levee would bring some much-needed relief and give them a fighting chance to hold back the rivers' devastation.

"They would fight as hard as we would if they were in our shoes," Birk said of critics of the plan to detonate the Birds Point levee.

The residents living in and around the spillway are fighting to stop the Corps from ever activating the plan, which, as of Friday, remained on hold while an army of scientists and engineers monitored the critical river gauge at Cairo. State and federal politicians, too, are fighting in court, seeking a restraining order on the corps' plan.

At just north of 59 feet, the gauge was predicted to hit 60.3 feet as soon as Sunday, putting the levee system at increasing risk of an uncontrolled breach. That scenario could send 2.5 million cubic feet of pent-up river bursting into millions of acres, possibly devouring thousands of homes southward into Arkansas and Tennessee, something the Corps wants to avoid at all costs -- even if it means the drowning of the floodway and the livelihood of scores of residents.

A city 'worth saving'

On Friday in Cairo, Kent Webster watched bubbling muck belch from a 12-foot by 8-foot hole in the pavement of Commercial Avenue. The street, which looked like it had been hit by a bomb, was another victim of the sand boils chewing up levees and infrastructure.

Webster, a lifelong resident of the city of 2,800 in the cradle of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, has some choice language -- some French, as he put it -- for those who want to save the spillway and let Cairo drown.

"It's saving lives instead of land," he said of the plan to breach the levee. "The land will dry out, but you can't return a life."

Several blocks down Commercial Avenue, inmates from the Illinois Department of Corrections worked side by side with community members, sandbagging and wrapping plastic in a war against the seeping water.

"The most significant leaks started at 7 p.m. [Thursday]," said Jim Pitchford, part of a team from the Illinois Emergency Management Association. "We let the water come through the boil but not carry the debris out."

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., joined an entourage of Illinois lawmakers Friday touring flood-battered parts of Southern Illinois. At a news conference in Cairo, Durbin said any decision on the Birds Point levee should be left to the Corps, and based on a review of critical infrastructure and threats to life and limb.

"They have no particular bias in this, and I think we ought to continue to give them that authority," Durbin said. "If this is going to continue to turn out to be a battle of lawyers on both sides of the river, a lot of innocent people could be harmed."

U.S. District Judge Stephen Limbaugh on Friday issued his ruling giving the corps the go-ahead to blow a hole in the Birds Point levee in Mississippi County, but the state was appealing that decision.

"Most of us believe this city is worth saving," Durbin said. "Cairo has a lot of fine people here who work real hard for a living, who have struggled through some very hard times. We want to stand behind them and make sure they know they have a lot of friends, not just in Springfield but in Washington."

No matter what, Cairo resident Kent Webster said river people never stop fighting the river.

"Ever since I've lived here we've always been fighting the river at one point or another," he said, expressing his faith in the levee system. "It's just going to be an ongoing battle."

'Blessed people'

Back in Olive Branch, the rivers seemed to be winning.

Amos Tucker's camouflage hip waders were wet beyond his hips as he piled plastic bags of possessions into a small boat. Late Friday afternoon, the water was a foot away from his front door; it already had lapped up the contents of his garage. He had seven pumps working, but wasn't sure they would be enough to keep the backwater of the rivers and Horseshoe Lake back.

"We're trying to get what we can out, do what we can to save what we got," he said. His whole neighborhood pitched in, busted their tails, in Tucker's words, but the levee broke and shut them down.

"It just wasn't enough," he said.

An urgent plea spray-painted on the back of a large piece of plywood expressed the desperation: "Help needed."

Just down Illinois Route 3, at the home of Naomi Bigham, the human spirit was doing all it could to keep up with the rising floodwaters. Some two-dozen volunteers filled and stacked sandbags all around the home Bigham has lived in for more than 50 years. Her sons and their wives had put down 2,000 sandbags by Monday, and a flood of volunteers followed to lend a helping hand, including one man who came all the way from New York, Bigham said.

"Somebody posted something on -- what do you call it -- the Internet," she said, the constant hum of pumps working behind her. "There's a lot of blessed people in this world that people don't know about."

Rashel Plunkett drove from Jonesboro, Ill., with a car loaded with water bottles and food for the weary.

"It breaks your heart when you drive through and see just the roofs of houses," she said. Plunkett, whose husband is the new pastor of the Jonesboro First Baptist Church, just returned from a trip to Arkansas, where her family is fighting horrendous floods. She learned things are tough all over this destructive spring.

"I saw towns with their houses under water," Plunkett said.

Jennifer Cain, a clerk at a convenience store on the edge of town, said the store has been busy selling a lot of gas and a lot of alcohol. People are coping any way they can, she said.

The flood fight went on Friday night, beneath flashlights and floodlights.

Maybe the water will win in Olive Branch, but the flood fighters will tell you it won't be from a lack of trying.

"Everyone's working together to try to save what they can," Cain said.

mkittle@semissourian.com

388-3627

Pertinent address:

Olive Branch, IL

Cairo, IL