Hundreds ordered to flee homes in Iowa City

Damage could have been worse
The damage would have been worse had it not been for the Herculean efforts of students, faculty, National Guard troops and others who swarmed the campus over several days to erect miles of sandbag walls, some as high as 9 feet.

On Saturday alone, volunteers filled and installed more than 100,000 sandbags, Lehnertz said.

Lehnertz was confident that buildings that hadn't flooded by Sunday were well-protected. He said the most pressing issue was flooding in the six miles of underground tunnels that feed steam to campus buildings for power. Workers pumped water from the tunnels into the streets and down toward the river.

Some buildings at the Arts Campus on the river's west bank had as much as 8 feet of water inside.

All elective and non-emergency procedures were canceled at the university hospital, and non-critical patients were discharged, Mason said. Nurses were brought in from elsewhere to ensure all emergency shifts would be covered.

Bruce Brown, 64, a retired radiology professor at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, spent three days filling sandbags on the east bank. But picturesque brick Danforth Chapel, where his daughter was married, flooded anyway.

"When I think about moving rare books from the bottom of the library, I weep," he said. But then he joked about pulling sandbag duty with a hulking Hawkeye football player.

"I weigh 129, he weighs about 300 pounds," he said. "He would ship these things that were like dead bodies to me. But that was fine. We worked together and got it done."

Elsewhere in the Midwest, hundreds of members of the Illinois National Guard headed to communities along the swollen Mississippi River on Sunday for sandbagging duty while emergency management officials eyed rain-swollen rivers across the state.

Two levees broke Saturday near the Mississippi River town of Keithsburg, Ill., flooding the town of 700 residents about 35 miles southwest of Moline. The National Weather Service said the Mississippi would crest Tuesday morning near Keithsburg at 25.1 feet. Flood stage in the area is 14 feet. Rising water threatening approaches also prompted Illinois officials to close a Mississippi River bridge at Quincy.

A levee break along the Iowa River in the southeastern corner of the state swamped tiny Oakville, population 439. Also in southeast Iowa, authorities told all the roughly 250 people in Fredonia to leave their homes and ordered more evacuations in two other small towns, Columbus Junction and Columbus City — all clustered near the junction of the Iowa and Cedar rivers.

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