Floods in the U.S. Midwest moved inexorably down the Mississippi River on Thursday through Illinois and Missouri as fears grew that up to 30 more earthen levees could be deluged or breached by the surging water. -
The river overflowed two levees in Illinois and another in Missouri overnight Wednesday, bringing to 23 the number of riverside barriers that have failed to contain the current floods, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Thursday.
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Emergency officials say levee breaks lessen the threat of flooding downstream while concentrating damage in the area around the flooded barrier.
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Further upstream, U.S. President George W. Bush was visiting hard hit areas of Iowa on Thursday, where flooding devastated several cities and towns last week, to see the damage for himself. Bush's visit included Cedar Rapids, where 24,000 people lost their homes when the cresting Cedar River overflowed its banks.
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"Obviously, to the extent we can help immediately, we will help," Bush said during a briefing by local and federal officials in a cinderblock emergency operations centre set up at a local community college in Cedar Rapids.
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Noting that several hundred federal emergency workers are fanning across Iowa, he added: "That ought to help the people in the smaller communities know that somebody is there to listen to them."
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During a helicopter tour, Bush saw some of the areas affected by the flooding that forced tens of thousands across six states to leave their homes and flooded more than two million hectares of farmland, with corn and soybeans worst affected.
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Corn prices more than doubled in trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange this week, although traders said prices were more stable on Thursday.
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Cost estimates of the damage to property and farms in Iowa are approaching $2 billion US, according to the Iowa governor's office, with reports from states downstream still coming in. In Washington, Congress has begun discussion of new disaster relief funding.
Flood risks ignored: experts
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Rural areas and small communities are most at risk from the surge, which is now moving down the Mississippi.
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Levees around urban areas are higher and better maintained, but outside of city neighbourhoods and downtowns, the earthen flood barriers along the largest river system in the U.S. have been routinely under-funded and neglected, according to experts.
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In 1993, the worst floods in generations swept down the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, topping levees and wiping out entire communities from St. Louis to northern Louisiana.
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Recommendations to improve the levee system were not followed and commitments to rebuild the barriers didn't receive enough funding, says one of the men who studied the 1993 disaster, Gerald Galloway of the University of Maryland.
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Galloway, a professor of engineering and an expert on flood control, said that he's seeing much the same response now from officials as in 1993.
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"We reported to the president in '94 that the levee system was in disarray, the levees were not high enough to take care of any potential problem. People didn't understand their flood risk and there wasn't good co-ordination across federal, state and local governments," he said.
Levees hundreds of years old
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"The same thing applies today," Galloway told CBC News. "It's amazing that in the face of [Hurricane] Katrina and now this particular challenge that we continue to relearn the same lessons."
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The 5,600-kilometre levee system along the Mississippi evolved informally over hundreds of years of settlement along the river.
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In 1852, the U.S. government turned maintenance of the flood control dams over to the Army Corps of Engineers. In recent years, and especially in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina's devastating floods in New Orleans in 2005, the Corps has been criticized for not moving quickly enough to update levees and prepare for unusually severe deluges.
With files from the Associated Press