Down By The Levee

Meanwhile in Missouri and Illinois the swollen Ohio and Mississippi rivers are well above flood stage and watching and waiting on a plan to breach the levees on purpose to flood farmland rather than towns and cities along the banks.

Persistent, heavy rains have helped swell the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to the highest levels ever recorded, said an Army Corps of Engineers official Sunday.


This ominous development prompted Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh, president of the Mississippi River Commission, to order several barges into place at 3 p.m. to begin pumping explosive slurry into a levee near where the two rivers meet. This is all in preparation -- if the decision is made -- to blow up the Birds Point-New Madrid levee and potentially flood 130,000 acres of Missouri farmland, in part to save the town of Cairo, Illinois.

At 8 p.m., the water levels on the Ohio River outside Cairo had reached 60.27 feet -- well above the flood stage of 40 feet -- according to the National Weather Service. And, boosted by more rain, the forecast calls for a continued rise to as high as 61.5 feet by Tuesday afternoon.

"This is the largest flood that we have ever seen in our lifetimes," Walsh said.

This one's going to be ugly, folks.  Hundreds of thousands of acres underwater versus hundreds of thousands of people.  Either way it's going to be bad...but the latter would of course be far worse.  A hundred-year flood is never a good thing.