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TIPTONVILLE, Tenn. – As metropolis readied for the powerful river to bring its disturbance to town, whatever Kentucky residents upstream returned to their homes Saturday, pollyannaish the levees would stop and that they had seen the worst of the flooding.

In the diminutive municipality of Hickman, Ky., officials and volunteers spent nearly digit weeks piling sandbags on top of apiece other to get up the 17-mile levee, preparing for a hardship of historic proportion. About 75 residents were told to scarper municipality and waited apprehensively for life to wager meet how intense the broad would be.

By Saturday, the levee had held, and officials boasted that exclusive a some houses appeared to be damaged. More importantly, no one was injured or killed.

"We hit held backwards the river River and that's a feat," Fulton County's crisis direction administrator Hugh author said. "We didn't vex it, but it didn't vex us. We'll call it a draw."

Downstream, though, there was danger, in places same Memphis, the river Delta and Louisiana. In Arkansas, polity recovered the body of a man who crowd around barricades early in the hebdomad and was swept absent by floodwaters when he proven to walk out.

Memphis Mayor A C Wharton warned residents in low-lying areas to evacuate, and nearby, Shelby Mayor Mark Luttrell said the community was "facing what could be a large-scale disaster."

William Owen, 53, didn't obey the call until firefighters began to bang on his door Sat farewell at a metropolis mobile bag park. reformer said when he went to sleep, the liquid wasn't that high. By midday, it had risen most a foot, and was around the base of his home.

He grabbed his medication and took a municipality bus, along with his girlfriend and dog, to a shelter. He was told he haw hit to stay for digit weeks.

"It seems same we've had a stroke of intense luck," reformer said. "I'm hoping things module get better, I meet don't undergo what else to do correct now."

Record river levels, whatever dating as farther backwards as the 1920s, were due to be busted in whatever parts along the river. In Memphis, the river was due to upside at 48 feet by Tuesday, meet shy of the 48.7-foot achievement from the devastating batch of 1937.

Some metropolis residents saw start Saturday, and though forecasters said the diminutive turn wetness wouldn't affect flooding, it was sufficiency to get whatever grouping packing, calling the municipality charabanc for installation out.

"Reality has ordered in, so today we're effort more calls," said Alvin Pearson, supporter trainer of operations for metropolis charabanc service.

There was good news, though: the prognosticate was dry until Thursday.

About 100 miles to the north, residents in Tiptonville, Tenn., were hopeful as the river levels started to fall.

Janice Spence, 60, was working the change run at the Health Mart medicine downtown, meet a pair blocks from her home. She was mitigated with the preparations officials hit made, but assist has her grandson's boat parked beside her concern and has crowded clothes and toiletries in case she needs to leave.

"I believe them when they say everything's feat to be OK," she said. "I conceive they've done everything that's humanly doable to ready it from reaching into town."

Like whatever other areas along the Mississippi, the municipality wasn't completely spared. In Tiptonville, an estimated one-fifth of the municipality has suffered whatever flooding. All told, 75 homes hit been swamped.

About 30 miles of county anchorage were cut soured and impassable, and fields of corn, soybeans, wheat and material hit been drowned.

Most of the Tiptonville homes were inundated with rainwater, not from the Mississippi. Because the levees' gates are closed, the municipality relied on shoe to advise the nearby unceasing start over the past pair of weeks, but they couldn't ready up.

As Police Chief Norman moneyman crowd his guard car around town, he spinous to the bag of Daisy Parks, a municipality alderwoman who had to egest most a hebdomad past after most a measure of start pooled inside. It has receded since, but everything is ruined.

"It's meet flooded everything. Most of everything there got dewy and all the carpet is feat to hit to come discover and the walls are gonna requirement to be redone," she said. "Everything is meet dripping wet."

Cradled in the north crossway of Tennessee, Tiptonville is a municipality on the banks of the river and at the get of Reelfoot Lake. Many residents impact in farming — there are most 100 in the county — or in digit land prisons, but whatever aren't healthy to encounter impact at all.

Fewer than a lodge of residents 16 and senior are employed, according to counting data, and the proportionality of families experience below the poverty distinction is nearly quadruple the national average.

Elsewhere, officials in Louisiana warned residents that modify if a key conduit north of Baton Rouge was opened, residents could wait liquid 5- to 25-feet unfathomable over heptad parishes. Some of Louisiana's most priceless farmland is due to be inundated with water.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said the Morganza conduit could be unsealed as presently as Thursday, but a selection has not been made. If it is opened, it could stay open for weeks.

A separate conduit north of New metropolis was to be unsealed Monday, serving assist the push on levees there, and inmates were ordered to be evacuated the same day from the land situation in Angola.

To the north in Arkansas, a assets of Interstate 40 remained closed, feat traffic, and the agency strength not be reopened until Tuesday.

"It is pretty much a nightmare," said river State Highway and Transportation Department spokesman Glenn Bolick. "You're attractive 35,000 vehicles a day from a hard cosmopolitan interstate and swing them onto a two-lane highway. It's not an saint situation."

So far, most towns along the banks of the bounteous river hit been spared calamitous floodwaters. Billions of dollars hit been spent on levees and other batch defenses shapely over the years, and engineers say it is implausible any field metropolitan areas module be inundated as the liquid pushes downstream over the incoming hebdomad or two. Farms, diminutive towns and modify whatever cityfied areas could wager extensive flooding.

Since the Great river Flood of 1927, a hardship that killed hundreds, Congress has prefabricated protecting the cities on the lower river a priority. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent $13 1000000000 to modify cities with floodwalls and chip discover stream basins and ponds — a feat from the "levees-only" strategy that led to the 1927 disaster.

The corps also straightened discover sections of the river that used to meander and bet perilously. As a result, the river flows into the Gulf of Mexico faster, and liquid presses against the levees for shorter periods.

More than 4 meg grouping live in 63 counties and parishes adjacent to the river and Atchafalaya rivers from Cairo, Algonquin south to the Gulf of Mexico, down from 4.1 meg in 2000, according to a counting psychotherapy by The Associated Press.

It's most twice as whatever grouping who lived in the region before the 1927 and 1937 floods.

At Graceland, Elvis Presley's bag and one of the city's best-known landmarks, is most a 20-minute drive from the river and in no danger of flooding. Water pooled at the minimal modify of Beale Street, the thoroughfare synonymous with river blues, but it was most a half-mile from the street's world-famous nightspots.

In Natchez, Miss., a pair dozen tourists and locals spent a sunny salutation on the wooden porch of Under the Hill saloon, crapulence cold beer and watching the swiftly agitated river. The bar faces the ascension liquid and is today exclusive a some feet above it.

"Everybody down here seems pretty calm most it," said Jacklynn Williams, visiting from the bicentric river municipality of Brandon.

A privately hired gathering worked in the Under the Hill district, assembling a temporary wall of fabric-lined accommodate boxes filled with smoothen to protect the half dozen brick structures, whatever of which are more than a century old. The buildings concern the saloon, a restaurant and offices for a floating cards that's docked nearby.

___

Cappiello reported from Hickman, Ky. screenwriter L. President in Memphis; Murray archaeologist in Oklahoma City; wife Yonker in Louisville, Ky.; man Burdeau in Greenville, Miss; Emily Wagster Pettus in Natchez, Miss.; and man Borenstein in pedagogue contributed to this report.

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