Last week we posted that the Ohio River may be too high to allow the running of the Great Steamboat Race on May 4th.    The river has just kept rising.   Tonight the Army Corps of Engineers will blow up a  Mississippi River levee, flooding farms in southern Missouri to save a flood-threatened Illinois town upstream near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.  A legal challenge by the Missouri attorney general to stop the destruction of the levee failed Sunday, allowing the Corp to proceed with the plan.

Record-breaking floods force engineers to blow up Mississippi River levee

The announcement late Monday afternoon caps days of preparation – and legal wrangling – over the move. The breaches, scheduled to be blasted Monday between 9 p.m. and midnight CDT, would mark only the second time in nearly 82 years that the levee, part of the Birds Point-New Madrid floodway, has been activated.

“We have exceeded the record stage already, at Cairo,” said Major Gen. Michael Walsh, president of the commission, in a prepared statement announcing the decision. “We are on a course to break records at many points as the crest moves through the system.”

“I don’t have to like it, but we must use everything we have in our possession … to prevent a more catastrophic event,” he said.

Blowing this section of levee “does not end this historic flood,” he said, but engineers say they expect the effort to reduce flood levels by up to four feet at Cairo, Ill., the community in the most immediate danger.

Thanks to Phil Leon for passing along the news.