 IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) -- A week's work of frantic
sandbagging by students, professors and the National Guard couldn't
spare this bucolic college town from the surging Iowa River, which has
swamped more than a dozen campus buildings and forced the evacuation
Sunday of hundreds of nearby homes. The
swollen river, which bisects this city of about 60,000 residents, was
topping out at about 31.5 feet - a foot and a half below earlier
predictions. But it still posed a lingering threat, and wasn't expected
to begin receding until Monday night. "I'm
focused on what we can save," University of Iowa President Sally Mason
said as she toured her stricken campus. "We'll deal with this when we
get past the crisis. We're not past the crisis yet." The
university said 16 buildings had been flooded, including one designed
by acclaimed architect Frank O. Gehry, and said others were at risk. Iowa
City Mayor Regenia Bailey said 500 to 600 homes were ordered to
evacuate and hundreds of others were under a voluntary evacuation order
through the morning. The city had no estimate of the number of homes
that had actually flooded. Bailey said homeowners will not be allowed back until the city determines it's safe. Gov.
Chet Culver said it was "a little bit of good news" that the river had
crested, but cautioned that the situation was still precarious. "Just
because a river crests does not mean it's not a serious situation," he
said. "You're still talking about a very, very dangerous public safety
threat." Elsewhere, state officials girded
for serious flooding threats in Burlington and southeast Iowa including
Fort Madison and Keokuk. Officials said 500 National Guard troops had
already been sent to Burlington, a Mississippi River town of about
27,000, and some people were being evacuated. Culver
said the southeastern part of the state was likely to "see major and
serious flooding on every part of the southeastern border of our state
from New Boston and down." In Cedar Rapids -
where flooding had forced the evacuation of about 24,000 people from
their homes - residents waited hours to get their first up-close look
since flooding hammered most of the city earlier this week. Some
grew angry after long waits to pass through checkpoints. Cedar Rapids
officials also were inspecting homes for possible electrical and
structural hazards. "It's stupid," said Vince
Fiala, who said he waited for hours before police allowed him to walk
five blocks to his house. "People are down on their knees and they're
kicking them in the teeth." The city's
municipal water system was back to 50 percent of capacity Sunday, a big
victory after three of the city's four drinking water collection wells
were contaminated by murky, petroleum-laden floodwater. That
contamination had left only about 15 million gallons a day for the city
of more than 120,000 and the suburbs that depend on its water system. After
much of the University of Iowa's Arts Campus flooded in 1993, raised
walkways were installed that doubled as berms. But those were quickly
overwhelmed by the Iowa River's rising waters. Standing
beside the grayish water surrounding the limestone and stainless steel
Iowa Advanced Technologies Laboratories, designed by Gehry, Mason
choked up. "I got tears in my eyes when I saw what was happening here," she said. Across
the river, Art Building West was surrounded by a lagoon of murky water.
Designed by Steve Holl, it was one of only 11 buildings in the world
recognized last year by the American Institute of Architects, said Rod
Lehnertz, director of campus and facilities planning. 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 thing
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. --- Associated
Press writers Melanie S. Welte in Des Moines, Jim Salter in Iowa City
Maria Sudekum Fisher in Columbus Junction, Iowa, Don Babwin in Chicago
and Charles Babington in Quincy, Ill., contributed to this report.
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