Midwest flood woes head south

IOWA CITY, IOWA — With floodwaters receding in much of Iowa, the destruction moved downstream Tuesday as emergency crews and residents raced to bolster the levees that protect dozens of Mississippi River towns.

National Guardsmen joined hundreds of volunteers in filling sandbags and reinforcing earthen barriers in southeastern Iowa, eastern Missouri and western Illinois. The mood grew frantic when several major tributaries to the Mississippi spilled their banks and the river surpassed record flood levels, swamping towns along the way.

Early Tuesday morning, more than a dozen sandbagging volunteers and a motorist had to be rescued when a levee was breached in Carthage Lake, Ill., about 70 miles southwest of Davenport, Iowa.

The advancing water swamped farmland and the community of Gulfport, Ill., leading officials to shut down the Great River Bridge, which connects that part of the state to Missouri.

In Burlington, Iowa, postal workers and schoolteachers waded through waist-deep, muck-laden waters, dragging plastic sheets and lugging sandbags in their effort to hold back the flow.

In La Grange, Mo., residents watched helplessly as the Mississippi filled the streets for the third time in 15 years. The post office was flooded, and City Hall was in danger. So were scores of homes in the town of about 1,000, whose residents were forced to rebuild after floods in 1993 and 2001.

"A third time? I can't do it," a weepy Harold Ludwig, 68, the town's former mayor, told the Associated Press. "I'm sorry."

Part of the problem, said U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Ron Fournier, was that it was nearly impossible to predict which barriers -- such as the sandbag and earth-based ones being furiously built along the Mississippi -- might crumble beneath the mounting water pressure. Officials don't know where to focus valuable time and energy.

"That's a crystal ball that nobody has," Fournier told reporters.

President Bush plans to visit Iowa on Thursday to tour the disaster region. At a news conference, he said funds would be set aside to help flood victims. "I unfortunately have been to too many disasters as president," Bush said.

Though state and federal experts were still assessing the damage to large swaths of the Midwest on Tuesday, they said the impact would be substantial.