WINFIELD, Mo. — The weakest spot left along the swollen Mississippi River may be the Pin Oak levee, a barrier so tenuous that soil slides down its slope.
Only National Guard soldiers and firefighters in life vests are allowed to stack sandbags, because volunteers and heavy equipment could sink. A single muskrat recently created a geyser of river water by digging into the berm.
But the earthen levee is all that’s still protecting 100 houses, a city park, several businesses and 3,000 acres of agricultural land in east Winfield, one of the last towns where the upper Mississippi was expected to crest.
For days, emergency management officials in Lincoln County have focused on the 2 1/2-mile-long levee about 45 miles northwest of St. Louis. A storm with thunder and lightning Tuesday was only the latest impediment to the desperate attempts to shore up the Pin Oak.
“This storm is not a good thing,” said Jeff Stamper, a structural engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers. “It pulled everyone off. You can work on a levee in the rain, but not in lightning.”
While levees in the nearby communities of Elsberry and Old Monroe held strong, an urgent call went out this week for volunteers to fill up to 50,000 sandbags here.
The Mississippi was expected to finally crest at Winfield sometime late today and to flow at its high-water mark — more than 11 feet above flood stage — for several more days. A disturbance as minor as a passing boat could lead to disaster.
“A 2-inch wake could be the difference between saving the levee and catastrophic failure,” said Andy Binder, Lincoln County emergency management spokesman.
Thirty-five levees have overtopped during the Midwest flooding, and seven of them had been federally designed and constructed, said Ed Hecker of the Army Corps of Engineers. He said the nation’s levee system wasn’t designed to hold back such extraordinarily high waters. “This system pretty much performed as designed,” he said.
