Rain, Rain

For days, people in St. Louis watched the flood-swollen Mississippi inch up on the levees. One night this week, the flood reached its awesome crest. Under steady pressure from weeks of rain throughout its vast basin, the Mississippi rose to its highest point in 103 years (39.3 feet), spilled into the city's grimy riverfront sections. Then, while hundreds of civilians and troops feverishly sandbagged key levees on the East St. Louis side, one of the sharpest earthquakes in St. Louis history rocked buildings, felled chimneys and split sidewalks.

The quake did little real damage. And since most of the city's main business and residential sections are set on high ground rising several blocks from the river front, the floods only wet the city's feet. But in the farm lands to the south, as far as the broad mouth of the Ohio River, every man that could be mustered worked on the levees as the flood swept down the valley.

The midsection of the Mississippi Valley was not the only part of the Midwest in serious trouble last week. A million and a half acres of rich corn soil had been drowned out by rain that had fallen all but nine days during the month of June. The Missouri was 10.3 feet above flood stage and still rising. In Iowa, Agriculture Department experts called erosion losses (over 5 million acres) the worst in corn-belt history.

Other experts estimated crop damage at $160 million, gloomily predicted that the U.S. corn yield would fall 40% below last year.

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