Forecaster Joe Lowery of the National Weather Service office in Memphis said it looked as though the river is starting to level out and could crest as soon as Monday night at or near 48 feet. Forecasters had previously predicted the crest would come Tuesday.
Memphis Mayor A.C. Wharton said lessons from past disasters have shown city officials the importance of going door-to-door to warn residents in flood-prone areas. He said there are also stepped up patrols of neighborhoods to prevent looting.
Wharton told CBS’ The Early Show that authorities are going back to some areas repeatedly to tell people that they should abandon their homes before they are swamped by waters from the rising Mississippi River.
Memphis residents have been abandoning low-lying homes for days as the dangerously surging river that threatens to crest just shy of the 48.7-foot record, set by a devastating 1937 flood.
Anora Brown, who lives in the flooded neighborhood of Frayser, watched the rising floodwaters creep along a closed section of U.S. Highway 51 near her home Sunday.
“The water is behind, it’s right behind my house, but it’s not up to the house yet,” Brown told NPR. “It’s very, very close,” she says. It’s within, let’s say about 12 feet maybe.”
She said that if the water rises much higher, she’s prepared to evacuate her home.
The swollen river has swamped houses in Memphis and threatens to consume many more, but its rise has been slow enough that some people were clinging to their normal lives just a bit longer.
Officials have issued evacuation notices to more than 1,300 homes as the flood zones grow due to the overflowing Wolf and Loosahatchie rivers and the Nonconnah Creek. Even as the Mississippi rises, some of the worst of the flooding is along its tributaries — as the mighty river’s high waters push a back-flow up those already swollen tributaries, flooding low-lying neighborhoods.
“They flow east to west so they normally dump into the Mississippi,” says Bob Nations, director of the Shelby County Office of Preparedness. “But now they can’t dump into the Mississippi so they’ve been backing up all week because they hit that wall of the Mississippi River rising.”
Nations said he hopes people don’t wait too long to get out of danger “because it’s much easier to evacuate dry than it is to do water evacuations.”
Officials said some 370 people were staying in shelters, with nearly 200 crammed into a shelter set up in a gymnasium at Hope Presbyterian, a sprawling megachurch east of Memphis.
With Hope stretched beyorn capacity, scores of people also were staying at other shelters in houses of worship around Memphis. Shelby County officials are relying entirely upon the faith-based community to house those displaced by the floods.
“The need is huge,” Michael Leirer, pastor of missions at Hope Presbyterian, told NPR. “From what I’m hearing, the river is going up even more, so within a few days or what not, we’re going to be seeing even more people coming in.”
But while some people fled to safety, others came as spectators. At Beale Street, the famous thoroughfare known for blues music, dozens gawked and snapped photos as water pooled at the end of the road. Traffic was heavy downtown on a day the streets would normally be quiet.
The river is “probably the biggest tourist attraction in Memphis,” said Scott Umstead, who made the half-hour drive from Collierville with his wife and their three children.
Col. Vernie Reichling, Army Corps of Engineers commander for the Memphis district, said the homes in most danger of flooding are in areas not protected by levees or floodwalls, including near Nonconnah Creek and the Wolf and Loosahatchie rivers.
About 150 Corps workers were walking along levees and monitoring performance of pump stations along what Reichling called the “wicked” Mississippi. “There should be no concern for any levees to fail,” he told The Associated Press in a downtown park on a bluff overlooking the river.
For Cedric Blue, the flooding in his south Memphis neighborhood near the overflowing Nonconnah Creek is a source of frustration and anger.
Blue, 39, has watched as the water engulfed three homes on his street, including that of an older woman who had to be rescued in a boat because she had refused to leave. He fears the rising water will ruin his house and his belongings while washing away a lifetime of memories that were created there.
Sunday afternoon, a garbage can floated in the high water near his house. Some feet away, the water had reached more than halfway up a yellow “No Outlet” street sign. He became emotional talking about how he has about 7 feet of water in his backyard and less than a foot inside the house, which his mother owns. They were in the middle of a remodeling project when the flood hit.
Blue said he wants the city, county or the federal government to give him a hotel voucher so he does not have to go to a shelter.
“I just want a new life and relocation,” Blue told the AP. “I would like the elected officials to come down here to see this with their own eyes and see what we’re going through.”
Flood waters were about a half-mile from the Beale Street’s world-famous nightspots, which are on higher ground.
The river already reached record levels in some areas upstream, thanks to heavy rains and snowmelt. It spared Kentucky and northwest Tennessee any catastrophic flooding and no deaths have been reported there, but some low lying towns and farmland along the banks of the river have been inundated.
And there’s tension farther south in the Mississippi Delta and Louisiana, where the river could create a slow-developing disaster.
Downriver in Louisiana, officials warned residents that even if a key spillway northwest of Baton Rouge were to be opened, residents could expect water 5 feet to 25 feet deep over parts of seven parishes. Some of Louisiana’s most valuable farmland is expected to be inundated.
The Morganza spillway, northwest of Baton Rouge, could be opened as early as Thursday, but a decision has not yet been made.
A separate spillway northwest of New Orleans was to be opened Monday, helping ease the pressure on levees there, and inmates were set to be evacuated from the low-lying state prison in Angola.
Engineers say it is unlikely any major metropolitan areas will be inundated as the water pushes downstream over the next week or two. Nonetheless, officials are cautious.
Since the flood of 1927, a disaster that killed hundreds, Congress has made protecting the cities on the lower Mississippi a priority, spending billions to fortify cities with floodwalls and carve out overflow basins and ponds — a departure from the “levees-only” strategy that led to the 1927 disaster.
NPR’s David Schaper reported from Memphis for this story, which contains material from The Associated Press. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]Login
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