US Army to Blast Hole in Birds Point Levee in South Eastern Missouri

Flooding of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers are causing the United States Army Corps of Engineers to do some radical things to protect residents in Southeastern Missouri and Southwestern Illinois. The Corps have decided to blast a hole in the Birds Point Levee to help reduce flooding.

From Fox News:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inched closer Saturday to blowing a hole in a Mississippi River levee to try to keep flood waters out of a small Illinois town after a federal appeals court declined to stop the move.

The corps moved a pair of barges loaded with the makings of an explosive sludge into position near the Birds Point levee in Missouri, but said it hadn't yet decided that it needed to breach the 60-foot-high earthen wall to protect Cairo, Ill. More than half that town's 2,800 residents had been evacuated from the area, local police said. Further upstream from Cairo, Ohio River communities, such as Old Shawneeville, Ill., were plugging leaks in their own levees, hoping they hold.

The 230 people who live in the southeast Missouri flood plain behind the Birds Point levee had already been evacuated from their homes, a spokesman for Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said. Some of the farmers whose roughly 130,000 acres of land would be inundated moved out what they could Saturday, assuming the corps will have no choice as the Mississippi and Ohio that feeds it rise.
"When the water hits this dirt, it's gonna' make a hell of a mess," one of the farmers, Ed Marshall, said as he packed up his farm office and hauled away propane tanks and other equipment. He said he was keeping an eye on the weather forecast, which called for several more inches of rain over the next few days. "If that happens I don't believe they'll be able to hold it."

In Cairo, a town at the southern tip of Illinois near the Missouri border, Mayor Judson Childs said he was relieved by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision early Saturday in St. Louis.