Rivers continue to rise, threaten Indiana towns

Rain-swollen rivers continued to rise Saturday in southwestern and south-central Indiana, threatening some communities with the highest floodwaters in nearly a century as soggy towns upstream began cleaning up the watery mess.\nIn north-central Indiana, some 100,000 homes and businesses remained without power Saturday, three days after a paralyzing ice storm. About 1,000 residents in Blackford, Jay and Randolph counties spent a second night in Red Cross shelters.\nMore than 250 Indiana National Guard troops worked Saturday to fill sandbags in Vincennes, Princeton and Jasper in southwestern Indiana, as well as Columbus and other communities. Another 100 troops were on hand for river rescues in Daviess and Dubois counties.\nPam Bright, spokeswoman for the Indiana Emergency Management Agency, said a Greene County resident and four dogs were rescued Saturday morning. Fifty people and six dogs were brought from flood-threatened homes to dry land on Friday, she said.\n"We've heard from a lot of people, including some of the old-timers, that this was the worst flooding they've ever seen," Bright said.\nMike Shartran, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Indianapolis, said the White River was at its highest level since March 1913 at Newberry and Bloomfield in Greene County, and at its highest recorded level in Edwardsport, all in southwestern Indiana.\nAnd the East Fork of the White River in southwest Lawrence County was at its highest level since January 1937. He said the river would likely not crest in Bedford, Williams and Shoals until Tuesday.\n"We probably won't see the rivers go below flood stage until at least next week. There's a lot of water moving downstream," he said.\nPike and Gibson counties declared local emergencies Saturday, bringing to 26 the number of cities and counties currently declared under an emergency.\nBright said the worst flooding was in Greene, Daviess, Knox, Gibson, Pike, Dubois, Martin, Lawrence, Orange, Jackson, Washington and Posey counties in southern Indiana.\nFloodwaters have receded in Spencer, Columbus and other cities, allowing the cleanup tasks to begin in those communities, she said.\nRunoff from heavy rains on Wednesday and Thursday also was causing problems at Patoka Lake in southwestern Indiana, where engineers had to open flood gates when the lake's water threatened to swamp its shoreline.\nAbout 64,500 Indiana Michigan Power customers remained without power Saturday evening, including 50,500 in Muncie. At one point, 115,000 of the utility's customers were without power.\nThe utility hopes to have power restored to 90 percent of the affected customers by late Monday and to all of them by late Wednesday with the help of about 1,500 utility crew members from as far away as Georgia, Oklahoma and South Carolina.\nThe crews were working 16-hour shifts, said utility spokesman Jim Riggle.\n"A new wave of fresh crews is coming in today to relieve some of the people who've been working for days. The system is built so we can have continuous operations," Riggle said.\nCinergy spokeswoman Angeline Protogere said about 2,500 customers remained without power Saturday evening, most of them in Kokomo. A total of 97,000 outages occurred at some point during the storm, she said. The company expects to get all power back by late Sunday.