Hannibal, Missouri. Photo: Jocelyn Augustino, FEMA

As waters from Iowa rush downstream and heavy rains continue to fall, the waters of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers are overflowing their banks and causing levee breaks which threaten Missouri communities with severe flooding.

Flood waters become especially damaging when levees are breached.  In the city of Winfield, a small town of about 800, north of St. Louis, a levee break occurred over the weekend of June 28, 2008.  Officials estimate that about 100 homes were damaged and about 1,300 acres of cropland were affected. 

PDA National Response Team members Rick Turner and Doug Macdonald visited several communities in Missouri and noted that a lot of the flooded areas were commercial.  Valuable farmland has been flooded, destroying crops of corn, wheat and soybeans that had been planted in recent weeks.

Turner and Macdonald report that the physical distance between villages and, in some cases, the distance between houses within a village will affect the response.  They stress the need to coordinate PDA’s response across presbytery, county and state lines in order to be efficient and effective.