DISASTER: Duck Drownder

St. Louis had escaped serious damage as the highest Mississippi flood crest in 103 years swept by (TIME, July 7). But south of St. Louis the little waterfront towns waited, fought the flood and passed the word downriver to towns like Grand Tower, Ill.

People in Grand Tower had been sandbagging their inadequate levee since April. As the river rose they speeded up their work. While children helped their elders fill sandbags with toy shovels, and every able-bodied citizen lugged the bags to the levee, the river kept rising. Suddenly, everybody knew Grand Tower was going to have a "duck drownder." People stacked furniture in upper stories, took cattle and chickens to the high pasture near the cemetery, and waited "for her to blow." At dusk one night last week, she blew.

"We Started Runnin'." "It started breakin' in one place, then another," said leathery, 60-year-old Fisherman John Quails, a flood veteran. "Then I heard a boy hollerin' up the way a piece, and I seen it was all over. We started runnin' and the water was right at our heels."

They ran for a piece of high ground north of town, picking up 72-year-old Mrs. Lula Packwell in her wheel chair on the way. At first, Mrs. Packwell was danged if she'd leave, even though the water was sloshing into her living room. But they took her along anyway.

By morning, some 600 of Grand Tower's 1,000 citizens were perched in the school building, the Methodist or Baptist churches, or in tents on the block-square island of high ground. Around them lay the deepest flood water in local history. They had brought portable oil stoves, bedding and other necessities to the island. The Coast Guard boat brought supplies every morning; the movie house rowed in a new film every night. The State Health Department vaccinated everybody for typhoid and smallpox.

No Longer Funny. About the third day, Old John Quails rowed out to his house, climbed through an upstairs window and looked at his stacked-up belongings.

"They're gonna have to have a new levee," he said, "or I'm gonna leave town. Year after year, I been takin' this water in pretty good humor. But no longer. Either they build a levee, or I'm takin' to the hills."

Up & down the ravaged Mississippi Valley last week, at least 48,000 refugees straggled back from the hills to homes and farms reeking with flood muck. Truck gardens were gone. Livestock was drowned. In 40 days, at least 4,000,000 acres of Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois had suffered an estimated $500 million damage—a cost only 25% below that of TVA, and slightly less than the money spent on Mississippi flood control in the last 16 years.

In Omaha, the governors of ten states met to protest congressional cuts in next year's flood control appropriations, asked the Congress to put the money back.