Tons of sand and limestone remain the major line of defense in the battle against the surging Mississippi River and its flooded tributaries.

Within the past week, about 3,600 tons of sand have been trucked from two sand companies to flood-threatened sites in the area.

One of the two companies Cape Girardeau Sand Co. at 1350 N. Water shipped out about 2,750 tons of sand for flood-control efforts between Monday and last Saturday.

But the rising river forced the sand company to shut down operations as of 1 p.m. Saturday because its sand yard was flooded.

The other area sand company is Lemons Gravel Co. at Dexter. A company spokesman estimated that about 856 tons of sand were trucked out for flood control work over the past five days.

In addition, "tens of thousands of tons" of crushed limestone from Southeast Missouri Stone Co. in Cape Girardeau have been used in building levees, said Danny Barks, the quarry's plant manager.

"We've been so busy here, I haven't even counted them," he said of the truckloads of limestone being shipped out.

"Water will go through sand. It won't go through limestone," said Barks.

Truckload after truckload has been hauled to Union Electric's Viaduct Court distribution center in south Cape Girardeau for construction of a permanent levee to protect the electrical distribution site from the rising floodwaters.

The demand was so high, the quarry stayed open one or two nights last week to provide the crushed limestone, Barks said.

Some of the limestone has also been used to fill sandbags for the makeshift levee in Dutchtown, threatened by flooding from the river-connected Diversion Channel.

The Cape Girardeau Sand Co. gets its sand by dredging it from the Mississippi River. Ironically, that sand is now being used to hold back the swollen river and its overflowing tributaries.

The sand hauled out last week had been dredged weeks before the flood hit. The flooding has halted dredging operations north of Cape Girardeau, said Sonny Lee Deimund, office manager.

Deimund said Wednesday that the river level must drop to 38 feet before dredging operations can resume.

Union Electric, the Cape Girardeau County Highway Department and the city of Cape Girardeau hauled off the bulk of the sand used for flood-control efforts, he said.

In addition, the company also sold tons of sand last week to its regular customers the ready-mix businesses who were looking to stockpile supplies of sand.

"We were really swamped," said Deimund. "We still had people calling us Saturday. We had to tell them our whole sand yard was under water."

Thousands of sandbags have been distributed.

Locally, the Corps of Engineers has handed out more than 400,000 sandbags.

Gene Huckstep, Cape Girardeau County's presiding commissioner, estimated Wednesday that another 175,000 sandbags have been distributed by the county.

He estimated about 100,000 to 120,000 sandbags were delivered to Dutchtown. About 200 truckloads of sand have been sent to the Dutchtown and Allenville area, Huckstep said.

Dutchtown resident Bill Geiser, who directed the building of the makeshift levee in his town, believes Huckstep's estimate is too low. He said many hundreds of thousands of sandbags have been used in building a levee along Highway 74 and sandbagging around Dutchtown homes.

So what happens to all that sand when the flooding subsides? The state highway department will haul off much of the sand for fill material, officials said.