Sojourn in a Far Away Land - The flood

You don't hear much about it in the news anymore, but the flood waters are still receding here. We probably look stupid driving around town and taking pictures of everything, but this is all new to us.
You can see how some of the river front is still under water. Notice the buoy that was washed in from the river channel.
My kids wanted to explore, so being the unfit parent that I am, I let them play in the mud and muddy water.
Notice how deep the mud is that has been washed in by the river. It is coating everything.
My kids started out with shoes on, but they got stuck and were soon full of mud, so I pretended not to see that they were running around barefoot in who knows what kind of filth and germs. You only live once, right?

Alan, however, did not want to get his shoes muddy.
The kids were disappointed to see that the playground was still unuseable.
We watched huge trees float down the river,
and lots of dead fish.
You can see how high the sandbags are piled around the stores and houses.


And you can see the mud marks on the houses and signs to show just how high the river water was in town. I don't know exactly how high the water was here in Clarksville,

but in Hannibal (25 miles north) the water crested at 29 feet. The flood wall you see in this picture is 16 feet high. They had sandbags on top of the wall (the white), but it still wasn't enough to stop the water.
The thing that I thought was funniest when I got to town was that every house seemed to have a porta potty in front of it.
I couldn't figure it out, until Alan said that they brought the potties to town for all the National Guardsmen who were filling sandbags. There must have been a lot of people! They just started removing the potties a couple of days ago. The sandbags don't seem to be moving at all. It makes me wonder if they expect another flood.