Red Star residents brace for floods; farm fields flooded in Alexander County

Sherry Shelton and her family prepared Tuesday to move out of their North Spanish Street house as Mississippi River floodwaters continued to rise, moving closer and closer to their home.

The 2016 flood left a foot of water in their house, she said.

A little more than a year later, floodwaters could again swamp their home.

After last year’s flooding, Shelton said they spent tens of thousands of dollars renovating the house.

“We completely gutted it,” she said, adding they are nearing completion of the renovations.

David Gomez places sandbags around the stairwell to the basement of his house Tuesday in the Red Star neighborhood of Cape Girardeau.Laura Simon

But with the current flood threat, Shelton fears the worst.

“All of our furniture is out,” she said.

Shelton said she and her family plan to relocate temporarily to a house her brother owns in Rockview, Missouri.

Despite the flooding concern, Shelton said she remains optimistic.

“We are going to get through it,” she said. “We have God on our side.”

Machaela Durham helps sandbag Tuesday in Olive Branch, Illinois.Laura Simon

The National Weather Service forecasts the Mississippi River will crest Saturday night at Cape Girardeau at 48.5 feet, 16.5 feet above flood stage and just shy of the 48.9-foot record level reached in January 2016.

As Shelton and her family were prepared to evacuate late Tuesday morning, the river already stood at 40.9 feet, the Weather Service said. Flood stage is 32 feet.

More rain is forecast for the region today and Thursday. That is bad news for the region, where heavy rains last week saturated the ground, said meteorologist Beverly Poole of the National Weather Service office in Paducah, Kentucky.

Poole said Mississippi River floodwaters will continue to rise over the next several days. She urged residents to keep a close watch on flood levels.

“Don’t let your guard down,” she said.

Tuesday’s sunny sky and light river breeze did little to calm flooding worries for Heather and David Gomez, who rent a house in the 1100 block of North Spanish Street. The Sheltons are their neighbors.

The Gomezes spent the morning stacking sandbags around their basement windows and basement doors with the help of fellow Red Star neighborhood resident Larry McHenry.

David Gomez and McHenry are Army veterans, but they did not know each other before the sandbagging effort.

“From my experience, everybody starts too late,” McHenry said of sandbagging.

Heather Gomez said she and her husband rented the house in spring 2016. She said their landlord told them the house had two feet of water in the basement during the winter 2016 flood.

Heather Gomez said similar flooding could happen in the coming days.

“It is scary, because the river is just over there,” she said, pointing to the rising floodwaters that covered railroad tracks a short distance east of her backyard.

A number of streets in the Red Star neighborhood have turned roads into dead ends, blocked by the rising water.

A part of Main Street looked like a lake Tuesday.

Work was underway Tuesday to temporarily raise Highway 177 just north of Hobbs Chapel United Methodist Church near Scism Creek in Cape Girardeau County, the Missouri Department of Transportation said in a news release.

The work is designed to prevent several residents from being cut off by the flooding, MoDOT said.

Without raising the road level, MoDOT officials said the highway would be flooded, and motorists would be forced to detour later this week.

Flooding has isolated Allenville along the Diversion Channel, said Dick Knaup, Cape Girardeau County director of emergency management. Twenty-six of the village’s 96 residents have evacuated, he said.

The rest are boating in and out, Knaup said.

“They are old swampers,” he added.

In a conference call with other mayors up and down the river who are active in the Mississippi River Cities & Towns Initiative, Cape Girardeau Mayor Harry Rediger said parts of Missouri received up to 12 inches of rain in recent days.

Rediger said more than four inches of rain is forecast north of Cape Girardeau in the coming days.

“That is very concerning,” he told reporters.

“We have a lot of sandbagging going on,” he said as floodwaters push into areas north and south of the city’s floodwall.

Highway 51 to the Chester bridge east of Perryville, Missouri, will close at noon Thursday because of flooding, according to MoDOT.

Across the river in Alexander County, Illinois, floodwaters continued to pour through a gap in an agricultural levee, flooding farmland.

The Len Small Levee was breached Jan. 1, 2016, amid major flooding.

The high water punched a quarter-mile-wide hole in the levee.

Alexander County Commission chairman Chalen Tatum said Tuesday the levee still has a gap.

The Army Corps of Engineers has not funded repairs, forcing local farmers to repair the levee as best they can.

High water is emptying into Horseshoe Lake and some roads have been washed away, he said.

“We are hoping it won’t go into any houses,” Tatum said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

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