The Missouri National Guard is closing off all roads leading into into the area that will be flooded if/when the Corps decides to blow the levees. So a Missouri jury might well convict someone of shooting a Missouri guardsman.
Cairo is being evacuated right now. Everyone is to be out of town by midnight. The problem now is “sand boils” . This water that is being forced by pressure under the levees to “dry” side. Apparently there are several very large ones boiling up in several places and they can’t be controlled.
And we are getting more rain...up to 4 more inches in Cape Girardeau over the next couple of days.
I don’t know the area well, but drive thru every couple of months on I-55 heading to or back from the south. Strikes me that the land on the west side of the river is far more productive. Rather than flood hundreds of thousands of acres of productive farm land in this day of soaring food prices, wouldn’t it make more sense to evacuate Cairo and let nature take it’s course? If it does flood the little town and some surrounding acreage, then we can flood the area with FEMA bucks after the deluge is past and rebuild Cairo (this time a bit higher, please).
Anyway, my prayers go out to folks on both sides of the river. If the rains continue and the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri all continue to swell, they may well all be underwater in a week or so anyway.
I have two sisters and a sister-in-law and their families who live in the small town of Morehouse, in New Madrid County and my mother in Miner, Missouri (Near Sikeston) who have already evacuated from their homes. Morehouse is about 40 miles west of the Mississippi. The Mississippi is not their primary problem but ordinarily calm and small Little River, which runs through Morehouse and is now a very full and very large river flooding the entire town. Plus the Wahite, about 2 miles west of the town is over it's levees
I was born and raised there and in all my 65 years there's never been a flood there.
I can't imagine what Diversion Channel in Cape looks like, it backs up on a some what regular basis anyway. Scott City, Benton and all points south of Cape are in danger too, all those small streams and rivers dumping in the Mississippi have no place to go.