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Dutchtown Braces For More Rain

The small Cape Girardeau County town of Dutchtown is preparing for more unwanted water.

Residents have filled 50,000 sandbags and readied two pumps to keep floodwaters out of the town of about 100 people. Thirteen homes and the post office are at risk of flooding from the Diversion Channel.

Water from rivers to the west of Dutchtown, like the Castor River, are the principal threat, because those river churn more water into the Diversion Channel.

Dutchtown Emergency Management director Doyle Parmer said the community could withstand an inch of rain.

“The headwater is the issue of Dutchtown,” Palmer said. “You have backwater from the river, and then you have headwater coming from somewhere else. They collide here. But I feel very comfortable in the level of the levee in which we have assembled in Dutchtown, that it will provide adequate protection for the flooding crest.”

The Mississippi River is expected to crest today at 45 feet on the Cape Girardeau gage. That is about three-and-a-half feet short of the all-time high water mark set in 1993.

Residents have applied for a buyout through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, but they are still waiting on the application.

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