Thousands of sandbags, 100 troops, three pumps added to Illinois flood fight as conditions worsen

Although the Mississippi River at Cape Girardeau has started a slow descent from near-record flood levels earlier this month, the water is still rising across the river in Alexander County, Illinois, as a result of recent heavy rainfall and flood seep water throughout the county.

“We’re still seeing the water level go up a minimum of an inch a day,” Keith Miley, operations manager with the Illinois Department of Transportation’s District 9 office in Carbondale, said Friday. “I think we can continue to expect a rise of about an inch per day for several more days.”

Illinois routes 3 and 146 between East Cape Girardeau, Illinois, and McClure, Illinois, have been closed for more than a week, submerged by up to a foot of water in some places. Route 3 between Gale, Illinois, and Route 146 has been closed even longer.

More than 100 Illinois National Guard troops from units throughout the state are in East Cape Girardeau this weekend building sandbag levees around the community that is now surrounded by water. The troops are working from dawn until after dark and some are being housed in one of the residence halls at Southeast Missouri State University.

One lane of Route 146 between the town and the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge leading to Cape Girardeau remained open Friday afternoon, but it was under 4 to 5 inches of flood water.

“IDOT started a fairly involved operation Thursday evening transporting 50,000 sandbags and 600 tons of sand to East Cape,” Miley said. By Friday afternoon, nearly 100,000 sandbags had been delivered to East Cape Girardeau and thousands more were also delivered to McClure, Miley said.

Illinois Route 3 between McClure and the Union County line to the north remained open Friday afternoon, although it was covered by several inches of water Miley expected to get deeper over the next few days.

“McClure residents are still able to drive on Route 3 north of McClure and can still get to Anna,” Miley reported. “We are continuing to monitor the situation there.”

Meanwhile, Alexander County emergency management director Mike Turner said three more pumps were added Friday to the 10 pumps already running 24 hours a day at Gale. The county is also operating three pumps east of McClure bringing the total pumping capacity to approximately 166,000 gallons of water per minute, enough to fill eight residential-size swimming pools every 60 seconds, nearly 500 in an hour or about 12,000 a day.

Asked whether that will be enough to keep up with the rising flood water, Turner said, “I’ll tell you next week. With the amount of water we’re pumping, it should be enough, and I’m hoping it will be, but I’m afraid to say it will, because it might not.”

As the Mississippi River levels continue to drop, Turner said he’s hopeful some flood gates in Union County around Wolf Lake could be opened in the coming week.

“That will indirectly help in northern Alexander County,” he said, adding additional gates can be opened when the river drops several more feet during the first half of July. However, additional rainfall could alter those plans.

Turner said every inch of rainfall drops about 27,000 gallons of water on each acre of saturated farmland in Alexander County. Multiplied by the 50,000 flooded acres in the county, that’s more than 1.3 billion gallons. As of Friday, 5.28 inches of rain had fallen this month in Alexander County, according to the National Weather Service in Paducah, Kentucky. June rainfall typically averages just more than 3 inches.

“Flooding in Alexander has been going on for months from one end of the county to the other,” Turner said. “Some Illinois counties have flooding when the Ohio River floods and some have it during the Mississippi River flooding. We’re lucky enough to have all of it,”

The forecast for the next few days calls for little or no rainfall, which Turner and Miley hope will give the pumps a chance to gain ground on the flood water.

“Without the pumps, we’d certainly be in worse shape,” Miley said.

Even with drier weather and lower river stages, Miley said it will probably be a couple of weeks “and hopefully sooner” before water is completely off the pavement along routes 3 and 146.

“After that, we’ll have to have an engineering inspection and we may have to do some repairs before we can open the roads back up to traffic,” he said.

The Mississippi River stage at Cape Girardeau was 42.6 feet late Friday, about 10.5 feet above Cape Girardeau’s flood stage of 32 feet. The National Weather Service on Friday was calling for the river to continue a slow drop to around 42 feet through the weekend before a more accelerated drop of about a foot a day starting later next week. The forecast could change, however, depending on the weather and river conditions upstream.