ALTON, Ill. — The height at which the water would take Becky Branstrom’s house was 35.5 feet. She already had waves in the basement of her blue Victorian in Grafton, Ill. By Friday night, her home had become an island. Every couple of hours, she walked to the window to see whether the water had reached her fence, her driveway, her steps.
It was all about the waiting.
Several hours to the north, where this flood began, cleanup crews were assessing the damage. Mucking out. Moving forward. But in the small riverside towns near St. Louis, people were still waiting. Waiting for crests. Or re-crests. Or all-clears.
Things had gone better than expected, with broken levees along the Mississippi easing the pressure on these communities to the south. But up through the weekend in some towns, there was still sandbagging and preparing and waiting and waiting.
The river was not expected to complete cresting at Winfield, Mo., and Grafton, Ill., until Thursday and Friday, according to the federal river forecast issued Monday afternoon.
A muskrat burrowed a hole in the soft ground of the 2 1/2-mile-long Pin Oak levee during the night, releasing a geyser of water, the Associated Press reported, and officials said it took nearly six hours to choke off the leak.
If the levee breaches, the river will swamp 100 homes in east Winfield, as well as 3,000 acres of farm fields, several businesses and a city ballpark.
Living on a river means living with unpredictability. All over the region, there was water in places it didn’t belong, sometimes creating massive lakes where there should be none, sometimes bleeding up through stalks of corn.
Worrying in Grafton
In Grafton, a village of 650, the waiting began Wednesday. Some folks got together to help Mayor Richard Mosby empty his woodworking tools out of the shop he owns. The Ruebel Hotel, where Branstrom is a bartender, closed in anticipation of the crest, which some reports said would be as high as it was in ‘93.
A third of the town’s residents moved away back then, after houses were irreparably damaged.
Kevin Edwards, who owns the local video store, packed his possessions in a U-Haul, which he then parked on higher ground. His house hadn’t flooded, but his belongings were still in that truck.
“The worrying is the worst part,” he said. “How high is it going to get? This Army Web site says we’ll be OK. The police say it still could get bad.”
Amid the waiting, it’s difficult to sandbag the worry. In the previous week, the town’s crest predictions had gone up and down in height, moved back and forward in date, leaving residents exhausted from playing flood hopscotch.
Water covered the video store parking lot and occasionally lapped against the back door.
“If it’s another foot, I’ll have water in the basement,” Edwards said. “If it’s like ‘93, then I lose my business.” Over the weekend, the water had risen to 29 feet. The National Weather Service was predicting a peak of six more inches of water by today.
The Ruebel reopened Friday afternoon. Owners weren’t sure they were out of the woods, but they were tired of the stress of waiting. “We figured people still needed to eat,” Branstrom explained to a customer. “Believe it or not, the only thing we’re out of is catfish.”
Outside, men were fishing on Main Street, and they were catching catfish by the bucket.
Alton shares resources
In Alton, 20 miles south of Grafton, the river was supposed to crest Saturday, then Sunday. A unified command center opened there Thursday morning, when it became clear the flood would continue down south; but by Thursday afternoon, the Weather Service was saying that Alton’s crest had probably happened.
The Red Cross set up a shelter with 64 beds, none of them used as of yet. Executive Director Robin Summers said people in small towns tend to have nearby family to go to, rather than shelters, but the Red Cross wants to be prepared.
Waiting.
So the command center in Alton sent resources to places such as Hamburg, an hour-and-a-half up the river. On Friday night, a parade of trucks — Red Cross, National Guard, Illinois Department of Transportation — wound down the two-lane road into the town, where everyone was building a sandbag wall they hoped would be high enough.
Tears, and more waiting, in Hamburg
More than 2,000 tons of sand had been assembled into a 6-foot-tall blockade. It should be tall enough for the 36.5-foot re-crest predicted for today, said Hamburg Mayor Jim Fortner. But the town’s 125 residents and a hundred more volunteers kept building anyway, seeing as they had nothing else to do but … wait.
Since the levees broke in the Missouri towns of Winfield and Elsberry, the pace of the water flowing into Hamburg had slowed, but a couple of houses have been lost. Last week, when the waiting started, there were no National Guard members — just the town and that creeping water. Residents marked its ominous progress by picking out landmarks as each one went under.
Thinking they wouldn’t have time to sandbag around all the houses, “we collectively decided we had to let a few go or lose the whole town,” resident Doug Smith said.
Smith, who moved to Hamburg from New Mexico six months ago, voted to let his own house go under. (He also owns the property next door.)
He took a break from sandbagging to tour his flooded house, the water thigh-deep through the first floor. In the front room, the coffee table was piled on the loveseat, which was piled on the stove, which Smith, 60, had been meaning to install.
“It’s strange to watch minnows swimming on your porch,” he said before bursting into tears.
“I’m not usually so maudlin,” he said, apologizing. It’s all of the 22-hour days of work and the waiting. And the guilt: “When you see the water level slow or drop, you know what that means. It means some other guy lost his stuff.”
Those failed levees across the river were the reason that Hamburg residents had the waiting time to fine-tune their sandbagging, time to get it right.
They owe it to those communities to save their town.
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