 "Floods, US")
The floodwaters that swept away cars and swamped living rooms decorated for Christmas slowly drained from homes and businesses outside St Louis, leaving behind months of cleanup as the threat of record-breaking floods headed south toward towns and farm communities flanking the Mississippi River.
As people in southern Missouri and Illinois evacuated their homes or moved furniture to the second floor, nervously eyeing the river rising along flood walls, highways that flooded around St Louis were finally reopened, and some soaked communities began allowing residents to return to survey the damage.
In Pacific, one of several hard-hit towns southwest of St Louis, about 20 people lined up at a police checkpoint in the morning, home-inspection papers in hand, anxiously waiting to learn whether they would be allowed back in to see what was left. They were among hundreds who fled when the rain-engorged Meramec River spilled across highways and through neighbourhoods, shattering flood records and rising to 27 feet above flood stage in some places.
Mitchell Duncan, 25, kept cycling through the line as the police told him he could not return to his rented duplex because it had yet to be inspected. He said he was impatient - he had left six days earlier without taking anything because he did not think the floods would be so bad.
"I'm not going away. I'm just going to keep checking," he told officers.
Duncan's sister, Stefanie Buscher, 30, standing next to him, told him: "What else would you do? You have nowhere else to go."
Lonnie Lewis, 56, also standing in line, had grown up in Pacific and said floods were part of life here. He and his brothers had replaced the electrical system and floors of his mother's home after it flooded in 2008, and he expected now that he would again be snapping photos of the damage to send to her insurance company.
"We understand what we're in for, and we know how to get through," Lewis said.
The number of deaths attributed to the floods rose to 22 on Saturday after Missouri officials reported they had found the body of a motorist who was swept away by floodwaters on December 26 in Polk County, in southwest Missouri.
As the waters headed south, officials in the southeast Missouri county of Cape Girardeau said they expected the Mississippi River to crest at a record level of 50 feet, a foot and a half higher than in the historic floods in 1993. While the floods have topped at least 10 levees in the region, the officials said they did not expect waters to spill over the flood wall that protects the city of Cape Girardeau.
"That's the highest crest we've ever had," said Charlie Griffith, deputy director of the county's emergency management office. "It's a lot of water moving around."
Sheriff John Jordan of Cape Girardeau County said that residents were piling up sandbags outside their homes and that water was already creeping into tiny communities in low-lying areas of the county. Encroaching waters from a river diversion channel had turned the hamlet of Allenville into an island.
About half of Allenville's roughly 100 residents had evacuated, but Phil Thompson was at home, watching water come within about 25 feet of his back door.
"The only way you can get in and out of town now is by boat," Thompson said in a telephone interview. "We just have to wait and hope and pray it doesn't get in the house."
Outside St Louis, in the town of Fenton, Saturday brought a pause after days of sleepless efforts to evacuate residents and protect homes there. Mayor Michael D Polizzi said that water levels had dropped by about three to four feet and that the town was slowly draining, "like a bathtub." He said a huge cleanup effort was ahead.
"We worked our behind off, and now we're in a lull," he said. "We're sitting, waiting for water to recede."
After spending two nights with relatives, Ryon Capestro, 27, got permission to return to his home in Pacific. He had gambled in recent years, not renewing his flood insurance because it had gotten too expensive. But he said that his house sat atop a few feet of concrete, and that he thought it would be safe.
"I never thought it would get this high up," he said. "Our house is supposed to be above flood stage. Guess we're finding out."
©2016 The New York Times News Service
