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MEMPHIS, Tennessee — The Mississippi River was within 18 inches of its highest level ever here tonight, and officials maneuvered floodgates and emergency crews and supplies into place, according to the Commercial Appeal.

The river is expected to crest 24 hours earlier than expected, and rise to just 7 inches shy of the 1934 record, 48.7 feet, the newspaper reported.

Elsewhere across the flood-taunted territory tonight:

>> Some Kentucky residents upstream returned to their homes Saturday, optimistic the levees would hold and that they had seen the worst of the flooding. In the small town of Hickman, Ky., officials and volunteers spent nearly two weeks piling sandbags on top of each other to shore up the 17-mile levee, preparing for a disaster of historic proportion. About 75 residents were told to flee town and waited anxiously for days to see just how bad the flooding would be. The levee held.

Downstream, though, there was danger, in places like Memphis, the Mississippi Delta and Louisiana. In Arkansas, authorities recovered the body of a man who drove around barricades earlier in the week and was swept away by floodwaters when he tried to walk out.

Memphis Mayor A C Wharton warned residents in low-lying areas to evacuate, and nearby, Shelby Mayor Mark Luttrell said the community was “facing what could be a large-scale disaster.”

>> Officials in Louisiana warned residents that even if a key spillway northwest of Baton Rouge was opened, residents could expect water 5- to 25-feet deep over seven parishes. Some of Louisiana’s most valuable farmland is expected to be inundated with water.

A separate spillway northwest of New Orleans was to be opened Monday, helping ease the pressure on levees there, and inmates were set to be evacuated the same day from the state prison in Angola.

>> To the north in Arkansas, a portion of Interstate 40 remained closed, causing traffic, and the road might not be reopened until Tuesday.

“It is pretty much a nightmare,” said Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department spokesman Glenn Bolick. “You’re taking 35,000 vehicles a day from a heavily traveled interstate and putting them onto a two-lane highway. It’s not an ideal situation.”

Corps’ cause

Since the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, a disaster that killed hundreds, Congress has made protecting the cities on the lower Mississippi a priority. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent $13 billion to fortify cities with floodwalls and carve out overflow basins and ponds — a departure from the “levees-only” strategy that led to the 1927 disaster.

The corps also straightened out sections of the river that used to meander and pool perilously. As a result, the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico faster, and water presses against the levees for shorter periods.

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.

It’s about twice as many people who lived in the region before the 1927 and 1937 floods.

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