Floods Missouri

Torrential rain flooded trailer parks and submerged a highway under four feet of water Thursday, adding more misery in a state battered by summer flooding. Storms with strong winds and hail pounded the region from central Missouri to southern Illinois, the National Weather Service reported. A suburban St. Louis woman drowned, and another woman was killed when her house was swept away.

Flash floods washed out roads, inundated homes and killed at least two people early Sunday after more than a foot of rain swamped east-central Missouri. The National Guard was sent to help with rescues and cleanup in hard-hit Franklin County, west of St. Louis, and Jefferson County, south of the city. The floods were caused by a storm system that arrived late Saturday after lumbering northeastward from Oklahoma, where hundreds of families were evacuated earlier that day.

Sandbaggers returned to duty and people still recovering from the summer's floods faced new evacuations and road closings brought on by colossal amounts of rain in parts of Missouri and Kansas on Friday. An elderly man died when his car was washed off a flooded road. "It's just happening all over again," said Eric Evans of Missouri's Emergency Management Agency in Jefferson City.

A man prosecutors said sabotaged a levee during the 1993 Midwest floods to strand his wife so he could have affairs was sentenced Monday to life in prison. James R. Scott, 24, of Fowler, Ill., was convicted in November on charges of causing a catastrophe. He admitted to police that he removed sandbags from the levee, opening a breach that allowed the swollen Mississippi River to flood 14,000 acres of farmland and destroy scores of buildings in West Quincy.

The Mississippi River sent a chill through St. Louis on Friday when it caused a major leak under the city's flood wall. A flash flood drowned three boys and a young man exploring a cave south of the city and swept away a woman and two boys, who were presumed dead. The flood wall sprung its leak in an area called Baden, in the north end of the city. The leak sent workers at a nearby factory scurrying for safety. St.

Prosecutors won't file charges in the case of four boys and two counselors killed when a flash flood raced through a cave during a field trip by a home for troubled youths. "We're not exonerating them of all wrongdoing, but I'm saying they did not commit a crime," St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch said Thursday.

In what his family called a miracle, a 13-year-old boy from a home for the abused and the afflicted was rescued Saturday after spending nearly 18 hours in the cold, watery, pitch-black depths of a cavern, where he had crawled onto a ledge as a flash flood thundered past, throwing the bodies of his dead friends against him. When two veteran cave explorers finally reached him, Gary Mahr, shivering and hungry, said he wanted a pepperoni pizza.

With the potential for twin disasters at hand, this city of 400,000 and its environs suffered a legitimate case of the jitters Monday as the great flood of 1993 continued besieging the region. The Mississippi River infiltrated the ground behind the St. Louis flood wall, sending its murky waters bubbling up through manhole covers, spurting out of engineers' measurement wells and seeping up to form a swamp complete with quicksand.

Feasting on floodwaters, the Missouri River rose faster and higher on Friday than had been anticipated, its crest skimming the tops of the few levees still standing and quickening the pace toward a fateful rendezvous with the Mississippi River just north of this city of more than 400,000 people. Moving up three feet in 24 hours, the Missouri and two feeder creeks transformed the state capital of Jefferson City into a near-island, cutting off access from the north, east and west.

Ste. Genevieve, the historic Missouri town that gained national attention when volunteers fought to save its French Colonial homes from last summer's flooding, received a $5.5-million federal grant Wednesday to build a new river levee. The grant covers half of the state and local matching funds required to build the flood-control levee. The federal government is paying 75% of the tab, estimated to be about $44 million. The town of 4,600 people is about 60 miles south of St. Louis.

Flood-weary residents watched Friday as the Meramec River dropped more than two feet from its crest, pushing a layer of muck into many homes and businesses. Thunderstorms that moved across much of Missouri on Friday--producing damaging wind, tornadoes and hail--failed to reverse the downward trend of the Meramec and other swollen streams in eastern Missouri.

The Meramec River surged higher Thursday, threatening an interstate highway, and some residents driven from their homes for the third time in a year waited out the high water at a church shelter. "You wrap your lifetime around a house," said Jim Thayer, who has lived here since 1953. "But it's getting so expensive to rebuild that a lot of people are going to have to give up."

Heavy rain in Missouri and Ohio caused flash flooding that killed three people, including a boy and his mother who tried to rescue him, police said. Snow and thunderstorms hit parts of Kansas, and heavy rain and hail fell in central Oklahoma. At least one tornado touched down near Tulsa, Okla. Downpours in southeast Ohio flooded roads and sent creeks and rivers over their banks.

Last summer's epic floods may have seemed like a Midwestern replay of the tale of Noah's Ark. But this spring, farmers along the Missouri River's banks feel as though they're wandering the desert. In what was once a cornfield, then a lake, Maurice Glosemeyer now trudges, sinking with each step, across dunes piled as high as eight feet tall. His tracks fade quickly as a cold west wind scatters the sand. Grit crunches between his teeth and stings his eyes.

Ste. Genevieve, the historic Missouri town that gained national attention when volunteers fought to save its French Colonial homes from last summer's flooding, received a $5.5-million federal grant Wednesday to build a new river levee. The grant covers half of the state and local matching funds required to build the flood-control levee. The federal government is paying 75% of the tab, estimated to be about $44 million. The town of 4,600 people is about 60 miles south of St. Louis.

Thunderstorms and high winds buffeted middle America on Sunday and brought deadly flooding to eastern and southern Missouri, where four people were killed and hundreds were evacuated after rivers spilled over their banks. A tornado touched down in southeast Missouri near West Plains. Up to nine inches of rain fell in eastern and southern Missouri, causing flooding and mudslides that closed many roads.

Heavy rain in Missouri and Ohio caused flash flooding that killed three people, including a boy and his mother who tried to rescue him, police said. Snow and thunderstorms hit parts of Kansas, and heavy rain and hail fell in central Oklahoma. At least one tornado touched down near Tulsa, Okla. Downpours in southeast Ohio flooded roads and sent creeks and rivers over their banks.

The Mississippi River rolled to a new high Tuesday night, hurling more floodwater through a levee along a tributary on the south side of town and trapping at least two city workers in water up to their necks. Authorities sent a fire boat to rescue them. But the driver of a front-end loader reached them first and hauled them to safety. A fireman said the workers were plugging holes in the levee. At one point, he said, up to three might have been trapped--but that all were saved.

A 23-year-old man has been charged with causing a levee break that flooded 15,000 acres and knocked out the only bridge on a 212-mile stretch of the Mississippi River during the summer's Midwestern deluge. James R. Scott of Fowler was jailed Saturday on a Missouri warrant issued a day earlier, said Sheriff Dan Campbell of Missouri's Marion County. Scott was held in lieu of $1-million bond.

Sandbaggers returned to duty and people still recovering from the summer's floods faced new evacuations and road closings brought on by colossal amounts of rain in parts of Missouri and Kansas on Friday. An elderly man died when his car was washed off a flooded road. "It's just happening all over again," said Eric Evans of Missouri's Emergency Management Agency in Jefferson City.