
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 7, 1993                   TAG: 9307070360
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: ORCHARD FARM, MO.                                LENGTH: Medium

FLOODING EXPECTED TO WORSEN

Bob Story takes the same road to town he's driven hundreds of times, only these days he's at the wheel of a motorboat instead of his Ford.

From the back of his pickup, Tom Fairchild is casting lures for catfish weaving past submerged street signs and cabins up to their windows in water three-quarters of a mile from the Mississippi River's usual course.

Weeks of heavy rains have pushed the upper Mississippi and its tributaries far out of their normal channels, replacing livestock and crops with fish and silt and flooding hundreds of homes. Flooding along the Mississippi and other Midwest waterways has been blamed for at least 12 deaths.

The water isn't likely to recede soon. So much water is still rolling down the river toward Missouri that the Mississippi hit record levels Tuesday at some Iowa towns, and kept right on rising.

All commercial and recreational traffic remained indefinitely tied up on a 436-mile stretch from East Dubuque, Ill., to just north of St. Louis.

Hundreds of National Guardsmen were on duty in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri to help with sandbagging and evacuations.

Water reaches into soybean fields and spills out of roadside drainage ditches. Around a big bend in the river, near Peruque, Mo., rising water broke through a levee Monday four miles from the Mississippi's normal channel.

The Mississippi appeared to have crested in Davenport, Iowa, Monday at 22 feet and was down slightly Tuesday. But because of more heavy rain in Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, it was expected to crest today at 22.4 feet. The record is 22.5 feet, set in 1965. Flood stage is 15 feet.

In St. Louis, officials have closed 23 of the city's 38 floodgates as the Mississippi climbed the steps toward the Gateway Arch. The river was expected to crest at St. Louis 12 feet over flood stage, though the gates and a flood wall are expected to avert severe flooding.

The flood was expected to have little effect downstream in Louisiana, said George Cry, a forecaster for the National Weather Service in Slidell, La. The river broadens and deepens below St. Louis, and flood-control projects are much larger, officials said.

by CNB