A small town's bid to stave off the Mighty Miss

Building an unorthodox barrier
To save time, the workers are trying an unorthodox method. Instead of solid sandbags, they began with berms of concrete traffic barriers and gravel, covered with plastic sheeting. Then came the yellow and green plastic sandbags, each one filled manually with upended, decapitated traffic cones as funnels.

“We don’t know that it will work and we don’t know that it won’t work,” said Smiley, who with her husband owns one of Clarksville’s antique shops. “But we did know that we would never get it done with sandbags because we have to go so high,” above eight feet in places.

In neighborhoods just south of downtown, residents on Sunday hustled to remove belongings from particularly low-lying structures.

“It’s hard to believe it’s really coming,” said Erin Garrison, a potter, as she removed a few last items from her Front Street gallery and studio space. “You can’t move it all,” she said, looking over the many unfinished ceramic works that remained on shelves. At her nearby home, “we already have about three inches in the basement. It will flood to the floor joists but the house should stay dry. If it’s worse than ’93, it may not.”

Unprotected by any sandbags was Clarksville’s oldest home, a pre-Civil War structure known as the Landmark House for its value to old-time river boat pilots. Tom Bankhead, an architect, said he and wife, Kathy, who have owned the place for about 11 years, believe it will be better off to let the floodwaters gently enter and leave the basement. To sandbag the structure and pump it out might actually put more stress on the sandstone block foundation walls, he explained.

Given that the single-story structure is touted as the “finest example of Greek Revival architecture in eastern Missouri,” he said, “people think that we’re being irresponsible.” But “we know what we will have left when we do it this way.” A veteran of the ’93 storms (“I was in Muscatine, Iowa, pumping 2,000 gallons a minutes out of my basement”), he hopes the water will stop short of the home’s living space.

Water already licking at riverside homes
After a five-mile ride to the south on a flat-bottomed jon boat, courtesy of fisherman Dockery, the water could be seen already licking at the first floors of homes in a riverside development called Marmac.  The homes there are built on eight-foot and higher cinder-block walls. This is where the Foremans, who own the inn and restaurant, live.

Dockery, who once had a place here himself, and other locals said they expected the water to reach above the ceilings of these homes. The Coast Guard has halted barge traffic on the river, so at least there is no risk of damage to the buildings from their big wakes, Dockery explained. But debris heading downstream and slamming into homes is a worry.

“It won’t be long before the river is chock full of logs and trees and everything,” he said. “Picnic tables, coolers, life jackets and, once in a while, a body.”

In the scheme of things, this magnitude of flooding is rare here. Locals would like outsiders to know that they mostly have flood insurance and assurances from weather experts that the 1993 flood was something they should expect only once every 200 to 500 years.

“That was a short 200 years,” said Clarksville Alderman Mike Brewer.

With the forecasted crest seeming to rise by the hour, Paul Foreman kicked himself a bit for not removing his furniture from his Marmac place. “I never thought it was going to get this high or I would have taken all that stuff out,” he said. But, “You can’t get a big sofa out by jon boat.”

Back at City Hall on Howard Street, Mayor Smiley was growing concerned about the berm-and-plastic foundations of the sandbag lines. With water bubbling up out of basements on the inside of the floodwalls, “they’re breeching as we speak.”

It would be impossible for the soldiers, inmates, volunteers and residents to do more, she said. “If it fails, it won’t be because there wasn’t a valiant effort.”

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