Julie Bosman and Manny Fernandez

The Illinois, the Missouri, the Arkansas and the Mississippi rivers were all at risk of spilling over in the coming days. The prospect put a patchwork of local and state officials on high alert Friday, as they prepared sandbags, assembled barriers and nervously eyed the rising waters.

This spring has been a season of record-breaking floods across the Midwest, submerging farms, businesses and houses. Scientists have predicted that the flooding this year could be worse than the historic floods of 1993, which devastated the region.

And once again, the people who live along the four rivers were reminded of the delicate compact they have made, enjoying the beauty, recreation and commerce that the rivers provide, but also accepting their regular capability for destruction.

In truth, these rivers are interconnected, each part making its contribution to the whole, said John M. Barry, whose 1997 book “Rising Tide” tells of the great flood of 1927 and the history of trying to tame the Mississippi River and its tributaries, which include the Illinois, the Missouri and the Arkansas.

At times, an overwhelming flood on one tributary can be devastating locally, but soon be subsumed into the larger system and forgotten. But when so many parts of what feeds the Mississippi River are experiencing record flooding, the effects are felt all the way down.

The punishing rains are consistent with the effects of climate change, since warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture — and release it.

Add to that the complication of how flood crests along the Mississippi move at different speeds depending on conditions. The first flood crest of the season moves relatively quickly. The crests that follow are pushing against higher water, slowing everything down. The high floodwaters stay and stay, saturating the levees and building up pressure.

“It is one system,” Barry said.

— Love and Hate Along the Mississippi

“Welcome to Alton,” reads the message painted on tall grain silos of downtown Alton, Illinois, as the steadily rising Mississippi River pools menacingly at their base.

The thick horizontal lines near the bottom of the silos mark major floods of Alton’s past. The black line is for 1973. The red line, several feet higher, is for 1993. A short walk away is a memorial commemorating 10 major floods in Alton, beginning in 1844.

For the third time this spring, workers in Alton, a city of 26,000 people not far from St. Louis, have assembled a concrete wall to help stop the latest round of expected flooding. The Mississippi, which stretches from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, could crest in Alton on Sunday or Monday.

Marilyn Carroll, the owner of a business downtown, a small area lined with antique shops, pubs and a secondhand bookshop, said she has had enough. She tries not to look at the river, only steps from the back door of Chez Marilyn, her dark cocktail lounge with vintage movie posters in the front and a hair salon in the back.

“It’s nauseating, to be honest,” she said. “When you grow up in a river town, you take the river for granted. But now I hate seeing it.”

Customers keep coming in, chattering about all the rain that’s expected upriver, in Iowa and northern Illinois.

“It’s just a detriment to your well-being to hear it,” she said. “I’m working all the time, trying to keep my mind off of it.”

She busied herself with her customer, Darrell Voorhees, 61, carefully snipping away at his hair. Voorhees, a retired welder, recalled being summoned down to the river to fill sandbags back when he was in high school.

All spring, people in Alton have been dealing with flooding. The water rises, then recedes.

So does their relationship with the river, Voorhees said. “It’s a love-hate thing,” he said.

— Watching, Waiting on the Arkansas

In Sand Springs, Oklahoma, local officials called what was happening on the Arkansas River dangerous. Homes were flooded nearly to their rooflines. Power was shut off in hundreds of other evacuated homes in anticipation of a deluge.

And yet, on Friday afternoon, some people were going toward the Arkansas, not away from it.

They came to see the water rushing out of the river’s Keystone Dam. The Army Corps of Engineers has been releasing water from the dam into the Arkansas River at a rate of 250,000 cubic feet per second, a flow it will continue through Sunday, after a week of heavy rainfall in the Tulsa region.

Beneath the persistent whoosh of the water, people stood on the banks beneath the dam, watching and sightseeing and taking pictures.

“It’s the No. 1 tourist attraction right now,” said Ernest Johnson, who lives in Tulsa.

“The public likes the river. We’ve been doing a lot of things in Tulsa to improve the use of the river, sightsee and riverwalks and bike-riding. This is just one of the risks you take living next to a river like this.”

In Oklahoma, the Arkansas has the power to pull people in or push them away. In calmer weather, they sometimes forget it’s even there. The river — the nation’s sixth-longest, flowing through Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas — also connects the distinct cultures of those four distinct states.

“If it rains in Wichita, Kansas, that water is going to go right past my office in about a week,” said Grant Gerondale, community development director in Sand Springs, a riverfront Tulsa suburb of 20,000 that was hard hit by flooding this week.

Officials are bracing for some of the worst flooding in decades in the Tulsa area this weekend, after the Army Corps of Engineers increased its release flow.

Several communities were recommending voluntary evacuations.

“We are not doing a mandatory evacuation,” the mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, told reporters Thursday evening. “We’re not going to drag somebody out of their house over this. But they need to know that if emergency personnel from our team comes to your house and tells you to leave, you have a couple hours before the floodwaters are expected to be in your neighborhood and you need to leave.”

— ‘No Way Out’ on the Illinois

Hardin, Illinois, a village of about 900 people, sits in a particularly unenviable spot this time of year, perched on the Illinois River near where it flows into the Mississippi River.

“When a flood happens, we’re trapped,” said Danielle Hurley, the city clerk, who on Friday afternoon was updating river forecasts every 20 minutes from the town office.

Hurley, 53, said there was little to do but wait, because of an immutable fact: “On the right side is the Illinois River, on the left is the Mississippi River.”

Hurley, who said she loved being out on the river, has studied its patterns during nearly three decades in Hardin.

The river, which runs fewer than 300 miles through Illinois, is forecast to crest Monday at about 10 a.m.

Hardin has seen catastrophic floods before. There was 1993, when a 500-year flood swelled the river to more than 42 feet above flood level. And 1973, when the water climbed more than 38 feet above flood level.

And then there was this month, May 7, when the river reached just under the 1973 mark, hitting its third-highest level in recent memory.

All those numbers matter because the Nutwood levee, just south of town, tops out at 38 feet. If the levee breaches, Illinois Route 16 would flood and the town would be cut off.

“If it goes, there’s no way out,” she said. “That’s our lifeline.”

Flooding this month led officials to close the Illinois River to traffic, and hundreds of volunteers, including schoolchildren and prison inmates, came to help fill sandbags. Those sandbags are still in place in front of Hardin’s homes and businesses — including Hurley’s house.

Even if the Nutwood levee holds back the waters this weekend, Hardin said she was still concerned about its long-term stability, given all the water it has had to contain in recent months.

“The levee has taken a beating,” she said.

— On the Missouri, Water and Wind

Jefferson City, Missouri, has been the site of dual crises this week.

As local officials prepared for flooding on the Missouri River, they were stunned by a tornado that ripped through town Wednesday night, cutting a path through houses, restaurants and a car dealership.

On Friday, near downtown and the Missouri Capitol, was the river, swollen, fierce and hours away from cresting.

Nearby, a few parking lots were filling with brownish water. Streets had been blocked off with orange traffic cones. Homes had been evacuated. Some curious passers-by milled around at the edges of the river, gazing across.

Because of the tornado, most state employees in Jefferson City had been told to stay home the rest of the week. The downtown had a deserted, empty feel, with businesses shuttered and few people milling around.

“I remember the 1993 flood,” Laura Stratman, who works downtown, said as she walked a few blocks from the river Friday. “Everything around here was just literally surrounded by water.”

Working near the river requires negotiations. When it floods, the street closures snarl downtown, making parking a puzzle and disrupting traffic.

“We just work around it — you have to,” said Brandon Owens, a body piercer who was on his way to his tattoo shop. “It looks really high now. It’s overwhelming.”

Even as emergency personnel blocked off more streets along the Missouri on Friday, pedestrians continued to set off on foot across it, taking a walkway on a bridge.

You can be drawn to the Missouri but also in awe of its power, Carrie Tergin, the mayor of Jefferson City, said as she coordinated cleanup efforts from the tornado while simultaneously tracking developments on the Missouri.

“It’s why we’re here, it’s why the capital was built here,” she said. “All the commerce came down the river. The river is who we are, but we also respect the river. We are reminded that we’re not in control of nature. And we wouldn’t want it any other way.”

Flooding in the Midwest: 4 Rivers Surge, Along With Residents' Worries

ALTON, Ill. — To say that there is a powerful river in the Midwest that is threatening to flood communities nearby hardly narrows it down.

Flooding in the midwest: 4 rivers surge, along with residents' worries

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Julie Bosman and Manny Fernandez

Articles written by the author

Flooding in the midwest: 4 rivers surge, along with residents' worries