Fighting off the ‘monster'

SLOAN, Iowa — The Missouri River west of town has turned against those who live alongside it.

It is slowly rising, ready to engulf everything the people here have worked so hard to build and turn their sandbagging efforts to naught.

“Water is a monster. It's a creature of its own. It will find a way,” said Karen Haveman, 55, as a crew of friends, family and neighbors stacked sandbags in a line on her porch. “It's going to come from every direction, I'm afraid.”

Haveman lives in one of the 13 homes in town that stand alongside the Missouri River in far northwest Monona County. Most residents in those homes are evacuating due to oncoming floodwaters.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expects that the water will not only inundate the land next to the river, but also much of the plain to the east.

“You're crazy not to get out of here. We won't be able to get out of here pretty soon because the roads will all be covered with water,” Haveman said.

Tuesday was a day of stacking sandbags and loading valuables into trailers as the brown water moved to within a few feet of back doors.

“We are just brain dead and numb right now. You don't know what to do first,” Haveman said.

Just to the south of her home, a small group was filling sandbags, which were then shuttled on ATVs over to Haveman's back deck, where another group stacked them.

One of the volunteers helping with the sandbags was Katie Scott, 30. She said the flooding and recent tornadoes in Alabama and Missouri made her think of the end times.

“It's the beginning of the end,” she said. “It's just scary.”

Just to the south, Sandy Walker, 49, was thinking along similar lines. Her pastor came by her home Tuesday morning. He said a prayer.

“We go to church, let me tell you. Scary time right now,” Walker said.

And with that in mind, and with the help of friends and relatives, people loaded their possessions onto trailers.

“Our house will be gutted when we get out of here,” Haveman said. “It's like moving ... And we are trying to do it without preparation. And that's not fun.”

Some residents said the homes are in an area that once was not considered part of a flood plain. But in 2010 there was some minor flooding, and FEMA reclassified the area, making the residents eligible for federal flood insurance. But many do not yet have coverage.

Also, many felt that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers should have been releasing more water sooner from the dams upstream. Had that happened, they said, they might not be in such a dicey position.

“There's no reason they couldn't be dumping water all winter. No reason at all,” said Rod Johnson, 66, as his possessions were loaded into a semitrailer truck.

The corps has said unprecedented releases from dams upstream have been dictated by recent, extraordinary rainfalls. Some areas of the upper Missouri River received about a year's worth of rainfall in about the past month. Snows also peaked at 140 percent of normal this past winter and fell far later than usual.

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman took a helicopter tour of some of the flood-affected areas between Sioux City and Omaha.

“Listen to local officials,” Heineman said. “If they tell you to evacuate, evacuate.”

He said South Sioux City, Neb., is attempting a “very innovative, very proactive” solution — building a 7,000-foot-long concrete dike in an attempt to protect the city.

The people who live along the Missouri west of Sloan say they do so because it is normally quiet and peaceful, “a paradise,” as Walker put it.

Haveman has huge picture windows in her house, allowing her an expansive view of the river and the tree-covered bluffs on the Nebraska side that tower over it.

It's breathtaking. But the downside was painfully evident Tuesday.

“If this is the risk that we're taking living here, it isn't worth it. Because it is too hard to watch everything that you have worked so hard to build be taken away,” she said.

World-Herald staff writers Paul Hammel and Nancy Gaarder contributed to this report.

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