Crews work to save town from flooding

HAMBURG, Iowa -- Crews scrambled yesterday to protect a southwest Iowa town from the swollen Missouri River, but local officials said it's unclear whether they'll be able to prevent the river from leaving the community under several feet of water for weeks.

If efforts to pile sandbags on a faltering levee and build a secondary barrier fail, part of Hamburg could be under as much as 8 feet of water for a month or more, Fire Chief Dan Sturm said. Flooding along the river this summer, expected to break decades-old records, will test the system of levees, dams and flood walls like never before.

"We're working against the clock," Sturm said as many residents were packing up their homes and heading out of town. "There's a chance we can save ourselves from the worst of it. . . . But if water gets in here, it's going to be here for a while."

The earthen levee that guards an area of farmland and small towns between Omaha, Neb., and Kansas City has been partly breached in at least two places south of the Iowa-Missouri border. And emergency management officials expect new breaches in the coming days as the river rises.

That means Hamburg could be only the first of many communities to get hit.

The last time the Missouri crested at levels predicted now happened in 1952, before most of the major dams were built. And the flooding is expected to last into mid-August.

The Army Corps of Engineers will be releasing more water than it ever has from the dams by mid-June, meaning there are likely to be other levee problems like the ones near Hamburg, said Kevin Grode with the corps' water management office. "With these high flows, there's the possibility of more levee breaches," he said.

Officials also predict that the water will get high enough to flow over at least 11 levees in the area near Hamburg in the corners of southeast Nebraska, southwest Iowa and northwest Missouri.

Just across the state line in Missouri, several residents of Atchison County were also ordered to leave.