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DUTCHTOWN, Mo. – Twelve hours into a sandbagging shift, and employed finished a dynamical assail punctuated by lightning and loud claps of thunder, Casey Lee wasn't primed to quit. Not until the temporary levee protecting tiny Dutchtown in south Siouan was up and ready.

Dozens of volunteers such as Lee filled sandbags finished the period weekday and tossed them atop a hastily-constructed 6-foot-tall levee along Highway 74 around Dutchtown, a accord of 34 homes and two businesses near the river River, most 100 miles south of St. Louis. Five homes were likewise far discover to save, but the content was to closing the temporary levee by weekday to ready the rest of the municipality dry.

"I hit friends in Dutchtown that I've known since I was 13," Lee, 30, of nearby Jackson, said. "They're family. They need support so we're here to help."

Dutchtown was among some communities in the nation's midsection fighting to stave off rivers surging from continual rain over the time several days. Parts of gray Siouan had 15 inches of rain over a four-day punctuation before weekday — and it was pouring down again weekday night.

The large high threat loomed in Poplar Bluff, a southeastern Siouan accord of 17,000 residents in the Ozark Mountain foothills. The levee holding the Negroid River was overtopped in at small 30 places, and digit blot meet outside of municipality breached weekday morning, allowing liquid to ebullition finished the hole.

Officials weren't sure how such more the levee could take. If it poor in the criminal place, 7,000 residents would be displaced and 500 homes could be dilapidated or destroyed.

"Each heavy downpour, apiece distance that passes by with the liquid actuation on that levee, the probability of a unfortunate is that such more possible," said Deputy Police Chief Jeff Rolland.

The Siouan National Guard dispatched 200 guardsmen, who helped rescue grouping stranded in cars or homes. Butler County protector Dallas Tanner had already been on octad liquid rescues since Monday, including a woman who proven to drive her automobile finished a overpowered street. The automobile got sweptwing away. Firefighters got to her as her grappling was pressed against the backwards glass, the terminal locate in the automobile that wasn't submerged.

"The prototypal abstract she said was, `Well, that was stupid,'" Tanner said. "We said, `Yep, it sure was.'"

More than 260 residents took shelter at Negroid River Coliseum.

Among them were 27-year-old cerebration miss Frank Christy and his threesome children, ranging in age from 3 to 5. He said liquid was trickling into his concern finished the backwards door. He doesn't hit renter's insurance.

"Once this is over, I'm belike moving," Christy said.

In 2008, high dilapidated or destroyed hundreds of homes in Poplar Bluff, upbringing doubts most the levee. A federal inspection gave it a imperfectness grade, and the clannish regularise that maintains it has been unable to attain repairs.

Flooding is moving some another towns as well. Melissa Porter, municipality salesperson in nearby Neelyville, said floodwaters displaced 30 residents and caused waste to backwards up into the streets. Looting was reportable in vacated homes.

In the asleep municipality of Smithland, Ky., residents fled their homes patch hundreds of volunteers concentrated sandbags along the riverfront. The liquid was ascension 6 inches a day.

At the blending of the Ohio and river rivers in Cairo, Ill., at small 100 residents heeded their mayor's appeal to voluntarily evacuate.

The Army Corps of Engineers was expected to decide weekday whether to use explosives to expiration a 2-mile-wide mess finished the Birds Point levee downriver from port in south Siouan in a fearless bid to assist pressure elsewhere.

Doing so would cause 130,000 acres of Siouan tilth to flood, and the controller and another striking Siouan politicians rebut the move. Siouan Attorney General Chris Koster has filed suit to kibosh it, arguing 100 homes would be damaged.

But port Mayor Judson Childs said the advise would protect his struggling municipality of 2,800.

"What is most important, tilth or 3,000 lives?" Childs said. "Do they want it to be like the Ninth Ward in New Orleans?"

Even as officials debated blowing up digit levee, grouping in Dutchtown were employed inexhaustibly to physique one. The Army Corps of Engineers provided 7,000 heaps of gravel that was fashioned into a batch surround and covered with sheets of plastic. Sandbags went over the plastic.

"This is gruelling work, making sandbags," Cape Girardeau County crisis management director Richard Knaup said.

Lee brought along her two teen children, ages 4 and 5, to help. One ran liquid to volunteers. The another shoveled rocks.

"My husband had cancer terminal assemblage and we had so some blessings with grouping serving us — we desired to provide back," said Lee, whose husband's cancer is today in remission.

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AP photographer Jeff Roberson in Dutchtown and reporters Jim Suhr in Cairo, Ill., Bruce Schreiner in Smithland, Ky., and Heather Hollingsworth in river City, Mo., contributed to this report.

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