MANKATO, Minnesota — Devastated communities across the Midwest are picking up the pieces after days of flooding that destroyed homes, roads and public facilities, with more storms likely to hit this week.
Recovery efforts and evacuations were taking place against the backdrop of extreme heat elsewhere, with 33 million people across the southern Plains, lower Mississippi Valley and the Southeast under some form of warning. Temperatures felt like more than 100 degrees in parts of the South.
Entire communities in Minnesota were submerged Tuesday. “We literally watched our childhood wash over the bank,” Louise Henderson, from Blue Earth County, Minnesota, told NBC News. She described watching trees and entire buildings being washed away.
Part of a house right next to Rapidan Dam, near Mankato, Minnesota, fell into the raging waters, Blue Earth County officials said Tuesday.
Officials said Monday that the dam was at risk of “imminent failure,” but later said its west abutment partially failed. Still, the torrent of water going around the dam gouged a channel into the earth that got wider and deeper by Wednesday, officials said. Now, the fear is not for the dam but a nearby bridge.
Jenny Barnes, who grew up in the house that fell into the river, said the family had accepted there was no way to save their home. Aerial footage showed part of the house dangling over the surging river, as the water erodes its foundations. An Xcel Energy substation and a park storage building have been swept away by the waters.
The dam is facing its second-worst flood surge, behind the flood of 1965, Blue Earth County Engineer and Public Works Director Ryan Thilges said.
The stricken dam has become something of a local attraction, with people turning up to take photos. But officials have warned that the ground is unstable and should someone fall into the rushing waters, there is no way to save them.
Over 40 counties in Minnesota have been affected by flooding, the governor’s office said.
Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, near a site where ruined furniture, carpets and other materials were being collected in Mankato, said the effects of the floods have been devastating.
“Looking at some of the items that are over there — for families, this is awful. And they’ve been hit hard,” Flanagan said Wednesday in the city of around 44,000.
Aerial drone footage showed entire houses underwater in South Dakota, with roads turned to rubble and cars floating away.
In McCook Lake, South Dakota, Kathy Roberts was able to escape with just her cat and the clothes she was wearing. “I have no ID right now. I have nothing,” she told NBC affiliate KTIV of Sioux City.
“I heard screaming outside and looked outside and I had neighbors that had water rushing into their place and water was slowly rising in my driveway,” she said of Sunday’s flood. “Within eight minutes, I was leaving my house and driving through water that was up over my step rails on my Jeep.”