CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The mayor of a small southern Illinois city threatened by two swollen rivers ordered all residents to leave by midnight Saturday because a “sand boil,” an area where river water was seeping up through the ground behind the levee, had become dangerously large.
Cairo Mayor Judson Childs issued a mandatory evacuation order for the city of 2,800 residents late Saturday afternoon hours after meeting with Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh, the Army Corps of Engineers officer tasked with deciding whether to blow a hole in the Birds Point levee in Missouri, downstream from Cairo, to relieve pressure on levees along the dangerously high Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
Walsh, who toured Cairo’s levee area, described the boil that has been growing since it was first spotted Tuesday as the largest he had ever seen, the Southeast Missourian newspaper reported.
Sand boils occur when high-pressure water pushes under flood walls and levees and
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