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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"These levees aren't meant to withstand everything," Patti Thompson, an Illinois Emergency Management Agency spokesman, said in nearby Quincy.

Quincy has been a staging area for levee support elsewhere, attracting people from hours away. Backhoe drivers steadily replenished mounds of damp brown sand as giant fans blew cool air on volunteers.

FEMA rushed more than 550 staff members to Iowa, determined to improve on its widely criticized response to Hurricane Katrina three years ago. Workers helped residents register for help.

"Even if they've already registered, maybe they just need someone to talk to," FEMA spokesman Vince Clark said. Although one man groused that the response suggested "Louisiana North," Clark said the agency's power is limited.

Back in Clarksville, a town of 350 that casts itself as an artsy riverfront refuge, Mayor Smiley did not wait for help. In May, after a winter of heavy snowfall and a soggy spring, she ordered 12,000 sandbags. The river rose and receded, but then came an ominous specter.

As the high water began to pour into the Mississippi basin 100 miles to the north, Smiley and a half-dozen volunteers started filling sandbags. There was no staff to call out: The water worker and streets worker had just quit, following the only other two paid employees out the door.

Smiley and friends spent three hours huffing to fill the bags and heave them into line.

"We looked out at that little sickly row, and I said, 'We can't do this,' " Smiley said above the roar of industrial pumps in a town hall that resembled a quartermaster's shop, packed with emergency supplies.

Smiley returned to her office and contacted every media outlet she could name. She said Clarksville and its dream were in peril. She called elected officials -- Pike County commissioners, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). She finished by dialing everyone she had ever met at an emergency management meeting.

And people came, bringing shovels and trucks and hundreds of tons of sand. A group of women organized 1,400 meals a day. When Smiley called an official in the nearby town of Louisiana at 10:30 p.m. to say that Clarksville needed a boat, it arrived before midnight.

"This thing was knocking on the door," Smiley said.

The river reached into low-lying neighborhoods, but by Saturday night, a wall about 21 sandbags high, 15 bags wide and hundreds of feet long guarded the business district. A symbolic gateway topped with the motto, "Clarksville -- Touch the Mississippi" was half underwater, but experts predicted the expected 36-foot crest would do no further damage.

Up the street, a sign on the Bent Tree Gallery, closed for now, said "God bless you for helping. Clarksville loves you!!"

Jim Cooper, raised along the river but now a regular visitor from St. Louis, turned the key in the door of his boyhood home. The place was intact and the prospects looked promising, yet with the water so close, hope had its limits.

"You're never optimistic until it's gone," he said.