MEMPHIS—The worst floods to hit the central United States in more than 80 years swallowed up homes, farms and roadways Monday, swelling the largest US waterway, the mighty Mississippi River, to six times its normal width here.
As officials patrolled stressed levees in waterlogged Memphis, Tennessee, after record spring flooding, Daryl Hissong and his three-year-old son were among thousands of people forced from their homes by the muddy waters.
They packed up on Sunday and by Monday morning there were five feet of water inside his home in Millington, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis.
“They said it’ll probably be a month before all of this goes down,” Hissong told AFP as he looked at the flood which had swallowed neighboring trailers up to the rooftops.
“They’re going to total it out and I’m not going to have a home.”
Levees and natural bluffs have protected most of Memphis from serious flooding, but those living in the affluent neighborhood of Mud Island were struggling to stay dry.
The floodwaters already have engulfed homes along the shoreline and on Monday broke through a sandbag barrier set up around a condominium on the other side of the road.
“We’re staying and riding it out, I guess,” resident Dawn Watkins said as workers reinforced the sandbags. “I didn’t have any water until just a few minutes ago.”
The Mississippi is normally about half a mile across in Memphis, but currently measures three miles wide in many places.
The US Army Corps of Engineers has deployed about 150 people to patrol the city’s levees day and night to check for potential problems.
“We’re very confident that the levee system is up to the test,” spokesman Jim Pogue said.
Portions of the Mississippi were closed to shipping and the US Coast Guard opened flood gates outside of New Orleans to help protect the low-lying city as a flood wave makes its way slowly down to the Gulf of Mexico.
“We’re looking at some pretty substantial flooding all the way from Memphis to Louisiana,” said Tom Bradshaw, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Heavy rains last month filled rivers and creeks already swollen from the melting of a thick winter snow pack, which are backing up because the Mississippi is so swollen.
It’s the biggest flood in the Mississippi Valley since 1937 and the river is rising above those records in some areas, Bradshaw said.
“What’s helping us is that we have a lot of levees we didn’t have back in 1937 and they’re able to control the water a lot better so you don’t see the massive displacement of folks and literally washing away of towns that you did in the old days,” Bradshaw said.
But it will still take weeks for the river levels to return to normal and there are plenty of homes which could be lost, particularly in the low-lying Mississippi Delta.