Evening star., 1937-01-31
3,OOOMenRush
to Repair
Break.
STEAMBOATS,
STANDING BY
Crest Of 6l-Feet
Is Expected
Wednesday.
Full Page of Flood
Pictures on Page All

b. the Associated Press.
CAIRO, ILL.,, January 30-The swift
Ohio River. swollen to the highest stage
in its history, put Cairo's mammoth
seawall to the test tonight.
Along the buttressed dike-a 3-foot
bulkhead crowning its 60-foot top
men hardened to fighting the Ohio
made grim preparations to defend or
flee their city at the rivers whim.
Women and children already have
gone.
Three thousand dixie workers raced
to the north drainage district levee
when the river. riding an 8mile-an-
hour current, Tapped over the slender
earthen barrier at its lowest point.
Feverishly they heaped bags of earth
to raise the bulkhead another foot.
At midnight the Ohios stage at
Cairo was So feet, foot below the
top of the seawall proper.
After 1t tops the wall-which fore
casters say it surely will do-the water
must either flow over or crush through
the 3-foot bulkhead before it can
sweep down on the sunken city which
juts thumblike into the confluence
of the Ohio and Mississippi. Cairo Is
confident the bulkhead will hold.
Rain was falling at midnight on the
Southeast Missouri "bootheel" drench-
inf levee workers who stacked sand
bags to hold back the Mississippi.
Floodway Patrolled.
Down in the Birds Point-New Ma
drid, Mo-, floodway-a 13l,000-acre
Mississippi River basin purposely
flooded In q desperate effort to save
Cairo-armed deputies cruised the
waters under orders to shoot to kill'
looters reported rifiing the barns and
homes of bottomlanders driven out of
the area.
Five thousand river basin farmers
along the recessed Missouri bank of
the Mississippi fled for their lives
before Army engineers bombed
through retaining walls and unleashed
the river into the basin early in the
week. Tonight they lived with thou
sands Of other refugees in concentra-
ton camps scattered over Southeast
Missouri.
Rescue boats continued to ply the
basins muddy expanse-in places
''house-top deep" in water-although
relief agencies believed practically all
the marooned farmers have been
taken out. There we're thrilling
rescues from RATS, house tops and
knolls which protruded above the ad-
vancing waters.
Saves Mules and Horses.
But on the same high points stand
mules, horses. cattle. chickens and
hogs, Of necessity left behind by their
fleeing owners. One farmer. Roy Ed
wards, padded a boat to New Madrid,
obtained a barge and sailed into the
basin to save II mules and 2 horses.
Amusing incidents brought sharp
relief against the stories of suffering
which came in with the rescue boats.
Dewey Harrison, connected with
the Federal Alcohol Tax Unit, rescued
seven reluctant bottom landers today.
In the past he had arrested each Of
them for liquor law violations.
Il lost 20 gallons of good stuff
out there" one of them told Harrison
Is he climbed aboard the rescue boat
Then there was Nose Akers, who
padded to safety in a hog trough,
and insisted he would have been in
the basin yet by grannies-but ran
out of tobaccer"
Hours of anxiety told the story of
other refugees. some taken from
Barnes Ridge only after food supplies
were exhausted. Others were picked
up from bobbing RATS tied to trees
to keep them from floating out of
the spillway and into the turgid
Mississippi.
At the lower end of the spillway,
just above New Madrid, $1,000 cubic
feet Of water q second poured from the