Flooded With Dread

As the River Rises, Folks in Some Towns Are Up to Their Necks in Apprehension

ALTON, Ill. Thirty-five-point-five feet. That was the height at which the water would take Becky Branstrom's house. She already had waves in the basement of her blue Victorian in Grafton, Ill. By Friday night, her home had become an island. Every couple of hours, the willowy blonde walked to the window to see whether the water had reached her fence, her driveway, her steps. This was its own form of water torture. It was all about the waiting.

Several hours to the north, where this flood began, cleanup crews were assessing the damage. Mucking out. Moving forward. But here in the small riverside towns near St. Louis, people were still waiting. Waiting for crests. Or re-crests. Or all-clears.

Things had gone better than expected, with broken levees along the Mississippi easing the pressure on these communities to the south. But up through the weekend in some towns, there was still sandbagging and preparing and waiting and waiting.

Living on a river means living with unpredictability. All over this region, there was water in places it didn't belong, sometimes creating massive lakes where there should be none, sometimes casually bleeding up through stalks of corn. Sometimes patches of land would be dry -- brown, even -- for miles. But then, all of a sudden, a patch of earth so swollen that grade-school science terms like "saturated" surfaced from memory.

The anxiety of waiting rose with the water, as the nearly swamped street signs seemed to take on ironic meaning. "Stop," they said. "Yield." In Grafton, a village of 650,the waiting began Wednesday. Some folks got together to help Mayor Richard Mosby empty his woodworking tools out of the shop he owns. The Ruebel Hotel, where Branstrom is a bartender, closed in anticipation of the crest, which some reports said would be as high as it was in '93. A third of the town's residents moved away back then, after houses were irreparably damaged.

Kevin Edwards, who owns the local video store, packed his possessions in a U-Haul, which he then parked on higher ground. His house hadn't flooded, but his belongings were still in that truck. "The worrying is the worst part," he said. "How high is it going to get? This Army Web site says we'll be okay. The police say it still could get bad."

Amid the waiting, it's difficult to sandbag the worry. In the previous week, the town's crest predictions had gone up and down in height, moved back and forward in date, leaving residents exhausted from playing flood hopscotch. Water covered the video store parking lot and occasionally lapped against the back door. "If it's another foot, I'll have water in the basement," Edwards said. "If it's like '93, then I lose my business." Over the weekend, the water had risen to 29 feet. The National Weather Service was predicting a peak of six more inches of water by Tuesday.

The Ruebel reopened Friday afternoon. Owners weren't sure they were out of the woods, but they were tired of the stress of waiting. "We figured people still needed to eat," Branstrom explained to a customer. "Believe it or not, the only thing we're out of is catfish."

Outside, men were fishing on Main Street, and they were catching catfish by the bucket.

It's not overwhelming water such as during Katrina. It didn't flood in all at once, then stagnate. It's water that inches up on you, tiptoes slowly, hides for a while only to reappear in a road or baseball field. Drip, drip, drip. It's enough to drive a person crazy.

In Alton, 20 miles south of Grafton, the river was supposed to crest Saturday, then Sunday. A unified command center opened there Thursday morning, when it became clear the flood would continue down south; but by Thursday afternoon, the Weather Service was saying that Alton's crest had probably happened. The Red Cross set up a shelter here with 64 beds, none of them used as of yet. Executive Director Robin Summers said people in small towns tend to have nearby family to go to, rather than shelters, but the Red Cross wants to be prepared. Waiting.

So the command center in Alton sent resources to places such as Hamburg, an hour-and-a-half up the river. On Friday night, a parade of trucks -- Red Cross, National Guard, Illinois Department of Transportation -- wound down the two-lane road into the town, where everyone was building a sandbag wall they hoped would be high enough.