Mississippi Breaches Levees, Crests Short of Records (Robin Stringer and Brian K. Sullivan)

  (Bloomberg) -- The Mississippi River breached more than a dozen levees in Missouri, flooding farmland and causing hundreds of residents to flee homes.

  The overflowing waterway may ensure that the flood, triggered by as much as 15 inches (38 centimeters) of rain in some parts of Iowa this month, will crest at lower levels downstream than previously forecast and will fall short of record levels set in 1993.

  ``If you have a bathtub full of water and someone comes along with a sledgehammer and knocks out a six-inch chunk of the bathtub, the crest in the bathtub will go down,'' said Alan Dooley, spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers in St. Louis.

  The levees breached north of St. Louis were agricultural levees built to withstand 30-year floods at most, Dooley said by telephone. The failure of those structures may flood 20,000 acres of farmland and ruin homes, he said. As the water floods streams over the levees, it will cause river levels to drop and accelerate the crest downriver, he said.

The Mississippi has breached or overtopped 14 levees in Missouri, according to Susie Stonner, a spokeswoman for Missouri State Emergency Management Agency in Jefferson City.

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