Flooding Lays Waste To Midwest

LAKE DELTON, Wis. - An embankment along a man-made lake gave way under severe flooding Monday, unleashing a powerful current that pulled several homes off their foundations and down the Wisconsin River.

Floodwater threatened dams across the Midwest, and military crews joined desperate sandbagging operations to hold back Indiana streams surging toward record levels. Stormy weekend weather was blamed for 10 deaths, most in the Midwest.

While the region struggled with flooding, the East was locked in a sauna. Heat advisories were posted Monday from the Carolinas to Connecticut, with temperatures topping 100 from Georgia to Virginia. New York City recorded a high of 99.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Monday it would close a 250-mile stretch of the Mississippi River - from Fulton, Ill., to Clarksville, Mo. - as soon as Thursday because of flooding, bringing barge traffic to a halt. The closure could last up to two weeks.

In Wisconsin, an embankment forming the side of the man-made Lake Delton failed, and the water poured out into the nearby Wisconsin River. The 245-acre lake nearly emptied, washing out part of a highway, sweeping away three homes and tearing apart two others.

"It's horrible. There's no way we could stop it," said Thomas Diehl, a Lake Delton village trustee. "The breach is between 300 and 400 feet wide. The volume of water was just so great there wasn't anything anyone could do."

A couple thousand people in Columbia County below the Wyocena and Pardeeville dams about 30 miles north of Madison were urged to evacuate, said Pat Beghin, a spokesman for the county's emergency management.

The Wyocena Dam's spillway had washed out, and workers were sandbagging to try to save it, Beghin said. The dam in Pardeeville also was overflowing, he said.

A new storm system was headed toward the Ohio Valley from the southern Plains on Monday - Oklahoma got up to 6 inches of rain by late morning and utilities reported nearly 5,000 customers blacked out - and the National Weather Service said as much as 3 inches of rain could fall on already waterlogged Indiana late Monday.

The weather service posted a tornado warning for south-central Illinois and a severe thunderstorm warning for Indiana.

Some 200 Indiana National Guard members and 140 Marines and sailors joined local emergency agencies Monday in sandbagging a levee of the White River at Elnora, about 100 miles southwest of Indianapolis. The White River was forecast to crest today at nearby Newberry at 16 feet above flood stage.

By Monday morning, flooding at eight sites in central and southern Indiana had eclipsed levels set in the deluge of March 1913, considered Indiana's greatest flood in modern times, said Scott Morlock, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Indiana.

Along the East Coast, people sweltered through the heat wave.

New York City opened 300 cooling centers Monday, said Office of Emergency Management spokesman Chris Gilbride. District of Columbia officials declared Monday and today Code Red days for poor air quality, and schools in parts of New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland closed early as classrooms heated up.

In New Jersey, a fire at an electrical switching station in West Orange knocked out power to about 75,000 customers of Public Service Electric & Gas for hours Monday.