MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Children played in front yards and neighbors chatted under a cloudless sky Friday in a south Memphis neighborhood, yards away from the rising water of the Nonconnah Creek.
The unforgiving creek has soaked Johnny Harris’ house as the rest of Memphis awaits flood waters from the Mississippi River. Harris estimated he had more than 3 feet of water in his small, rented house on a low-lying section of Hazelwood Street.
“It’s like an ocean,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Coast Guard closed a stretch of the swollen Mississippi to barge traffic upstream Friday in a move that could cause a backup along the mighty river, while police farther south in Memphis went door to door, warning thousands of people to leave before they get swamped.
Emergency workers in Memphis handed out bright yellow fliers in English and Spanish that read, “Evacuate!!! Your property is in danger right now.”
Near Nonconnah Creek, Jeanette Twilley and Shirley Woods waited anxiously, fearing the water will reach their homes.
“Hopefully, it don’t come up no more,” Twilley said.
All the way south into the Mississippi Delta, people faced the question of whether to stay or go as high water rolled down the river and backed up along its tributaries, breaking flood records that have stood since the Depression.
Because of levees and other flood defenses built over the years, engineers said it is unlikely any major metropolitan areas will be inundated as the water pushes downstream over the next week or two, but farms, small towns and even some urban areas could see extensive flooding.
“It’s going to be nasty,” said Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California-Berkeley who investigated levee failures in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. How bad it gets depends on how well the flood protection systems have been built and maintained, he said.
More than 4 million people live in 63 counties and parishes adjacent to the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers from Cairo, Illinois south to the Gulf of Mexico, down from 4.1 million in 2000, according to a census analysis by The Associated Press.
The Coast Guard closed a five-mile stretch of the Mississippi to protect Caruthersville, Mo., and said barges could be banned for up to eight days. The fear was that the wake from big boats would push water over a floodwall and into the town of 6,700.
Barges regularly move coal, grain, ore, gravel, auto parts and other vital products down the Mississippi. A single barge can carry as much material as 70 tractor-trailers, and some towboats can move 45 barges at once.
Lynn Muench, a vice president of the American Waterways Operators, an industry group, said the eight-day shutdown would have a multimillion-dollar effect on the barge industry and slow the movement of many products.