Southern Illinois communities keep sandbagging
METROPOLIS, Ill. — Volunteers and residents in Superman's adoptive hometown of Metropolis muscled together more sandbags Tuesday as the still-rising Ohio River threatened to further swamp the tourist haven where some people had turned to canoes instead of cars for conveyance.
Yet amid the sweaty filling of sandbags, there was cause for jubilance in Metropolis and other flood-endangered towns along the Ohio: Days of pounding rain have given way to welcome sunshine expected to linger into the week, and the government's blowing up of a southeastern Missouri levee to lower the river showed signs that it had done its job.
A day after Metropolis' mayor advised the city's 6,500 residents to consider heading to higher ground, the Ohio measured 54.63 feet — about the same level it had been Monday night, when the Army Corps of Engineers blasted open the levee as a relief valve near where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet.
Without that breach, the river was forecast to have steadily crept up to a crest of more than 58 feet, some three feet higher than its latest expected peak Thursday of 55.5 feet. Flood stage there is 39 feet.
A similar effect was noted down the Ohio in Cairo, where the river level that already had broken the 1937 record had been expected to reach 63 feet, just one foot lower than the floodwall for the 2,800-resident town. But as of midday Tuesday, the Ohio was at 60.2 feet — about a foot a half lower than it was at the time of the breach — and was forecast to keep falling to 59.4 feet by Saturday. That would still be more than 19 feet above flood stage.
“It's showing in our graphs that (the breach) had a pretty decisive impact,” said Rick Shanklin, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Paducah, Ky., just across the river from Metropolis.
That percussion of Monday night's levee blast — a series of thundering, orange fireballs — rumbled the ground as far as 40 miles away in Metropolis, leaving many in the Massac County town that claims Superman as its favorite son believing there was an earthquake.
While it was dry in Metropolis' kitschy downtown, including the 15-foot bronze statue of the comic-book hero standing sentry in Superman Square, many homes and businesses on side streets had given in to the Ohio, which last week forced the lingering closure of the city's Harrah's casino.
The river's rise, though slowed by the sacrificing of the Missouri levee, had Metropolis' faithful — along with National Guard troops and outsiders — adding to the more than 400,000 sandbags Mayor Billy McDaniel says have been cranked out since April 25 in the town.
While working one of several Metropolis sandbagging stations, Jim Parmely figured there was no other choice.
“A lot of people are going to lose their homes, but a lot of people aren't giving up this easy, either,” the 51-year-old worker on a tugboat said, refusing to pause his shovel. “Anybody sitting around on their couch at a time like this don't have much salt in my book.”
Just off of the town square, Chuck Peebles was paddling up the street, relying on a friend's canoe to get to and from his apartment above Kristy Stephenson's now-flooded reception hall. Peebles hadn't been forced out, accessing his digs by way of a fire escape, and didn't seem to mind floating around a town known for a character who often travels by flight.
“I'm an outdoorsman anyway,” said Peebles, decked out in sunglasses and a straw hat as Stephenson came to say hello. She was feeling upbeat about the break from days of rain — and blessed by the levee break the previous night that she said “saved a good number of people in this town, at least their homes.”
“I hate it for the people in Missouri who've been displaced, but we've definitely been helped,” said Stephenson, 40.
Downriver in Cairo, Police Chief Gary Hankins echoed that.
At the southern edge of that largely evacuated town, rising water that was overtaking U.S. 51 leading to a river bridge had sparked fears by Monday night that the floodwaters would work the downward slope of the city's main thoroughfare and inundate the city. A sandbag wall 4 feet tall was hastily erected across the road.
When he surveyed that area Tuesday, Hankins heralded that the water had retreated at least a foot.
“Things look slightly better, but we're not out of the woods,” he said while inmates kept filling sandbags outside an auto-parts store.
Pounding rains over previous days manifested themselves there in other ways. On the other edge of Cairo, the towering slope of a Canadian National railroad line that runs across a tunnel offering entry to the city gave way Tuesday morning, complicating the problems of the stretch that already had been closed for a week because of the Ohio's historic levels.