Flooding Strains Home and Heart

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Cleaning Up After the Floods

While rising waters are still threatening the lower portions of the Mississippi River, residents in Iowa and other states are beginning the arduous task of cleaning up the aftermath.

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Outside, the sidewalks were piled high with discarded furniture, soggy insulation and twisted metal. Not far from downtown, where relief trucks clogged the streets and volunteers handed out face masks, Papich and Gary Mann, an employee who will help rebuild, walked to the home of 79-year-old Dorie Hack.

"It's okay, Dorie," Mann said, reaching out to hug her.

"No, it ain't," said Hack, holding a muddy framed photo of her sister Betty in one hand and a bruised stained-glass lamp in the other. "I feel like committing suicide. I've lost everything."

Mann promised to return shortly to pump out her basement. Hack talked in resigned tones about the calamity. With two friends, she salvaged a few things -- refrigerator magnets, her collection of porcelain miniature puppies. Everything else they dumped on the curb.

Unlike Papich, she will not rebuild.

"I'll find me a little mobile home somewhere," she said.

Lois Russell, 83, built her life and family around the Mississippi, where she owns several hundred acres of corn and soybean fields. She remembers the Gulfport, Ill., levee break in 1965, and the high water that forced her to evacuate in 1993 but left the house dry.

This time, the water rose much faster. Her granddaughter Nancy, who operates a pumping station on the town levee, fled her post and ran to the highway to escape, while Nancy's husband was rescued by boat. After the levee broke, the family abandoned the house to the water, the muskrats and the bugs and took refuge on a nearby road.

As neighbors gathered to watch what they could not control, railroad worker Dean McIntyre gave up his hurried sandbag work.

"We did our best," McIntyre said, "and all you can do is hope."

In Gladstone, Ill., 110 miles south, sweat-soaked Illinois National Guard soldiers hefted sandbags like a bucket brigade while tattooed civilians in ponytails and sleeveless T-shirts joined two girls in tank tops whizzing around on all-terrain vehicles, delivering the sandbags to the fragile fortifications.

The next morning, despite their toil, the river burst through the levee, swamping the small town and thousands of acres of surrounding farmland.