Historic December flooding worsens along Mississippi

A historic December flood continued Wednesday to send rivers sweeping out of their banks and into hundreds of homes and businesses across Illinois, Missouri and Oklahoma as some residents braced for the waters to get higher and the risk even greater.

'Unusual doesn't begin to describe it - it's huge,” said Mark Fuchs, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service's St. Louis-area office, whose own backyard gauge collected 11 inches of rain from the storms that drenched the region between Saturday and Monday.

That rain has since drained into lakes, rivers and reservoirs and brought a belt of flooding stretching from eastern Oklahoma and through Missouri to downstate Illinois. So far, the storms and floods have killed at least 13 people in Missouri and five in Oklahoma.

Iowa is not at risk of wide-scale flooding at this time, but the Rock Island District of the Army Corps of Engineers is helping St. Louis, which is experiencing some of its worst flooding in 20 years.

The district, based at the Rock Island Arsenal in the Quad Cities, on Tuesday shipped 432,500 unfilled sandbags and 500 rolls of polyethylene to St. Louis, said Ron Fournier, district spokesman. Polyethylene is used to line levies to keep roiling rivers at bay.

As the National Flood Fight Materials Center, the district stores between 2 and 6 million unfilled sandbags in Rock Island and at the Saylorville Reservoir near Des Moines, Fournier said. The district also supplies at-risk areas with portable pumps and box barriers that can be filled with gravel or sand.

Reservoirs at Saylorville, Coralville and Red Rock near Pella are only about one-third full, Fournier said. Still, district employees are on alert about the possibility of emergency flooding.

'I've been here since 1991 and I can't recall this type of high water at this time of year,” Fournier said. 'It's something unusual.”

And it's only the start of a winter flood-fighting effort that is likely to eventually stretch all the way down to Louisiana as the Army Corps forecasts major flood levels on the Mississippi River to eventually reach Memphis and New Orleans.

What is so incredible about this week's flooding is not only the magnitude, but the timing.

To put this flood into perspective, all of the historic crests along the Mississippi have occurred during the spring melting season or the summer rainy months.

Under normal circumstances, wintertime flooding to this extent is not possible simply because there is not enough moisture in cold winter air to support such large rainfall totals.

For now, the worst of the struggle seems to be Missouri, where Gov. Jay Nixon has activated the National Guard as residents fled their homes in eastern Missouri and reports came in of drivers who died when their vehicles got swept off the roadways. Missouri and Oklahoma are now under a state of emergency, as are many counties in Illinois.

Hundreds of roads have been closed across the state, and temperatures hovered in the 30s as volunteers sandbagged in the cold.

In St. Louis, the National Weather Service said to expect 'major to historic” river flooding through the weekend. The mighty Mississippi, which runs through the heart of the city, is forecast to crest at 43 feet - a full 13 feet above flood stage, and one of the city's top three river crests on record.

In Pacific, Mo., a community of 7,077 about 40 minutes west of St. Louis, the bulging Meramec River was nearing a record high and had completely submerged parts of the city's downtown.

Pacific resident Cynthia Hurst, 45, fell asleep Sunday night after helping sandbag a neighbor's house only to wake up Monday morning and discover that floodwaters had reached her own home. The waters had reached the floor of their family's 2003 tan Ford Taurus parked in the street.

'Mom, the car's underwater!” called out her 12-year-old son, Leviticus.

The Hurst family quickly stacked their couches on crates, grabbed some clothes, packed a basket and evacuated.

Since Sunday, Hurst and her son were staying with a friend in Pacific in A one-bedroom, one-bathroom house now housing four adults, two children and two dogs.

Erin Jordan of The Gazette, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post contributed to this report.