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U.S. will blow up levee to save Illinois town
By Mary Wisniewski – Mon May 2, 7:48 pm ET
BIRDS POINT, Mo (Reuters) – The government said on Monday it will proceed to blow up a levee on the Mississippi River to relieve flood pressure on other levees along the critical commercial navigation route and save the historic town of Cairo, Illinois.
Carlin Bennett, a commissioner in the rural Missouri county that will bear the brunt of the flooding, estimated the operation will cause $1 billion in property damage. "It's going to be like a mini tsunami through here," he said. "We can't really imagine it right now."
The actual detonation of the protective embankment at Birds Point-New Madrid in Missouri will come between 9 p.m. and midnight local time, the Army Corps of Engineers said.
Major General Michael Walsh, the army officer in charge of the operation, said he would have preferred to breach the levee in the daylight on Tuesday with the water rising, the agency could no longer wait.
"The system is under tremendous stress," Walsh said. "This is the right time to operate."
By blowing up the levee, the Corps hopes to increase the Mississippi's ability to accommodate the rising waters of the Ohio River, sparing Cairo and other towns.
Both rivers have been rising as a result of days of rain and the melt and runoff of heavy winter snowstorms.
But the move will flood more than 100,000 acres of farmland in southeast Missouri and that state's attorney general tried unsuccessfully to get several courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, to block the move.
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon warned on Monday that the action would unleash "a tremendous amount of water" and local residents should cooperate with law enforcement officials.
The Corps moved explosives to the levee at Birds Point-New Madrid overnight and officials said the process of detonation would take about three hours.
Cairo, an historic town of 2,800 people located at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi, was largely empty after a mandatory evacuation as the Ohio, swollen by overnight rains, continued to rise to dangerously high record levels.
As of 5 p.m., the gauge on the Ohio River at Cairo showed the waters at 61.4 feet and the forecast was that they would crest at 61.5 feet -- 21.5 feet over flood stage and their highest level since 1937.
The Corps, the primary flood-fighting agency in the region, had said it would detonate explosives in the levee if the river at Cairo reached 61 feet and was rising.
Late Sunday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt the plan, saying the Corps had the right to breach the levee, as permitted by a 1928 federal flood control law.
"I don't have to like it," Walsh said. "But we must use everything we have in our possession to prevent a more catastrophic event."
Deborah Byrne, a minister in Charleston, Missouri who owns 550 acres of the farmland that will be flooded as a result of the intentional breach, worried it would take years for the county to recover from the controversial operation.
"It's not just 130,000 acres and rich landowners. There are many families connected with these farms. This land has come down through many generations."
Cairo, located at the southern tip of Illinois between two states, Missouri and Kentucky, that permitted slavery prior to abolition, was an important destination for runaway slaves during the Civil War.
Its population is more than 60 percent African-American and a third of its residents have incomes below the poverty level.
(Additional reporting by Miriam Moynihan; writing by James B. Kelleher)

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Originally posted by Hardware:

Wasn't Bush accused of having the levees around New Mogadishu err... New Orleans blown up to intentionally flood the city?

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