Ike and River Update

6:15 p.m.--Well, the rain gauge in the back yard has 4.85 inches in it. There are reports around the area of 5-7 inches. The strongest wind gust I saw on the weather channel's web site was 50 mph but not far from here there were gusts in the low 60s. I see Louisville, KY, had a gust of 75 mph. Doug, hope you were out of Loo'vill before that one! We have almost all of the water out of our west rooms in the basement (thank goodness for a shop vac, and power that stayed on.) We also mopped our neighbor's basement and re-set her dehumidifier this afternoon. We did make it to church, out to eat, and to a reception for a young missionary couple who will leave next month for Haiti. Now there's a challenging place to live--those poor people have had 4 hurricanes in the last month alone.

The area's rivers are all forecast to reach flood stage either tomorrow afternoon or early Tuesday, and all are forecast to have "major flooding." Not a lot of time to sandbag. We learned at church that Americorps is already on alert for flood duty--one of our younger women is a member. I misspoke about the Meramec in the earlier post. The 41 feet is for the Mississippi at St. Louis, where flood stage is 30 feet. The Meramec's flood stage at Valley Park is 18 feet and it is forecast to get to 27.5 feet by Tuesday. That will flood Highway 141 at I-44. The Missouri River will be out of its banks everywhere between Jefferson City and St. Louis. Flood stage at St. Charles is 27 feet and the river is forecast to go to 36 feet there. That will flood a lot of Highway 94 North of St. Charles. It won't be a repeat of 1993, but it will be significant--and this will be at least the third spell of high water and overtopped levees along the rivers in 2008.

As near as we could tell on our trek from North County to South City to Webster Groves and back today, gasoline is about $3.79 for regular and most stations seemed to be open and have all their pumps open. I just looked at the weather maps and "Ike" or his remnants are now over Michigan and Ohio. Thank goodness the storm was a fast mover, or no telling how high the water, mama, would be! I hope this is the last storm update I feel compelled to give for a while!