The gamecock. (Columbia, S.C.) 1908-2006, April 20, 2001, Page 4, Image 4
Floodwaters continue
to drown Midwest states
i
by Jenny Price
Associated Press
PRAIRIE DU CHIEN, Wis. —
Flooding on the swollen Mississippi River
pushed downstream Thursday, inundating
basements and streets as workers and
residents rushed to shore up dikes and
build sandbag levees.
In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott McCallum
called in the National Guard to help
distribute 20,000 sandbags Thursday as
emergency crews fought the rising river
in Crawford County.
“Our people that we’ve had out there
sandbagging and trucking — they’re
starting to get tired,” said county assistant
emetgency management director Gary
Knickerbocker. “So, hopefully, they’ll
be able to get some rest.”
The river climbed to 23.49 feet
Thursday at Prairie du Chien, flooding
the business district, and was expected to
crest Friday at 23.8 feet, National Weather
Service meteorologist Dan Jones said. In
1965, the river topped out at a record
25.4 feet.
From her front porch, Lois Puckett
surveyed flooded Main Street. Water
lapped against her front steps, and the
two-story home was surrounded by water
on three sides. More than 300 sandbags
were holding back the flood.
“I just hope it crests when they say
it’s going to crest,” she said.
People in La Crosse, about 60
miles north of Prairie du Chien, were
bracing themselves for rain predicted
Thursday night, said county emergency
management director A1 Spaulding.
The Mississippi crested Wednesday
at 16.41 feet at La Crosse, but dropped
to 16.24 feet by Thursday, Spaulding said.
“The flood is by no means over, even
though we reached this crest. We could
get this rain and get a new crest — even
higher,” Spaulding said.
Amtrak said its passenger route
between Chicago and Minneapolis
remained closed by high water Thursday.
Freight train .traffic also was affected. The
Mississippi River remained closed to barges
and pleasure craft.
Further upstream, in St. Paul, Minn.,
the Mississippi crested Thursday at
23.4 feet — almost 10 feet above flood
stage—and was expected to begin a slow
fall over the next two weeks, the National
Weather Service said.
In Davenport, Iowa, the only major
urban area on the upper Mississippi that
lacks flood control structures, the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers has helped the
city build a clay levee reinforced with
plastic and sandbags to keep floodwaters
out of the riverfront business district.
The river was 3 feet above the 15
foot flood stage Thursday. The National
Weather Service predicted a crest from
21.5 to 22.5 feet on Tuesday or
Wednesday. The record was 22.63 feet in
1993.
Davenport Public Works Director
Dee Bruemmer said if crest predictions
remain near 22 feet, the city should avoid
major damage.
“The critical point is 22 feet. If we’re
under that, we’ll be just fine,” Bruemmer
said. “But, the river and Mother Nature f
—
Castro holds ceremony to celebrate
anniversary of Bay of Pigs invasion
by Anita Snow
Associated Press
PLAYA GIRON, Cuba — With a
tank, a mortar and anti-aircraft artillery
as a backdrop, Cuban President Fidel
Castro on Thursday saluted the veterans
and victims of Cuba’s Cold War triumph
in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
At a ceremony on the coastline where
his forces claimed victory over a CIA
trained exile army 40 years ago, Castro
spoke of “remembering the fallen,
remembering the humble sons of the
nation who pushed forward into the
crushing blow of the pride and arrogance
of the empire.”
“Today is a day of glory that
nothing and no one can erase from
history,” the 74-year-old Castro said,
looking out at thousands of Bay of Pigs
veterans from a stage surrounded by palm
trees and decorated with heavy artillery.
He used the occasion to recast a U.N.
vote to condemn his country’s human
rights record as a “moral defeat” for the
United States. He said the U.N. censure
— narrowly approved in a 22-20 vote
Wfednesday by the 53-nation U.N. Human
Rights Commission—was not a blow to
communist Cuba.
Before Castro rose to address the
crowd of men, many with rows of military
medals pinned to the commemorative T
shirts distributed at the event, veteran
Ernesto Robaina Figueroa told his former
comrades-in-amis “there is no powerful
enemy for a people who know what they
are fighting for.”
The men, now in their 60s, 70s and
80s, cheered and waved small paper Cuban
flags in response. Most of the Cubans who
gathered on the island’s south-central
coast for the ceremony, which organizers
said drew 10,000 participants, were elderly
men.
Trained by the CIA in Guatemala at
the height of the Cold War, an invasion
force known as the 2506 Brigade was
comprised of about 1,500 exiles
determined to overthrow Castro’s
government, which had brought the Soviet
bloc closer than ever to the continental
United States by seizing power in Cuba
28 months before.
The three-day invasion failed. Without
U.S. air support and running short of
ammunition, more than 1,000 invaders
were captured. Another 100 invaders and
151 defenders died.
Victory for Cuba came on Playa
Giron, a strip of goigeous, palm-dotted
coastline on the Bahia de Cochinos, or
Bay of Pigs.
While exiles still blame their loss on
President Kennedy’s refusal to provide
additional air support, Cuban leaders have
always maintained that they won the battle
simply because they fought better.
Exiles in Miami remembered the
battle on Tuesday, the anniversary of the
beach landing at Playa Larga at the
innermost part of the Bay of Pigs, about
12 miles north. The fighting later moved
south, to Playa Giron.
“The Mercenaries Got This Far,” read
a billboard just outside Playa Larga,
showing a huge blowup of an old black
and white photograph of exile soldiers
taken prisoner after the battle.
“Here Was Unleashed a Decisive
Combat for Victory,” another nearby
billboard read.
Among the guests at Thursday’s
ceremony were relatives of former
castaway Elian Gonzalez, including the
boy’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, who
waged a seven-month battle to return his
son to Cuba from the United States.
The 7-year-old boy, who was seen
Wednesday afternoon at the entrance of
this beach’s only hotel, was not at the
event. Also absent were his stepmother
and younger half brother.
Cuba’s communist leadership
considers Elian’s return to Cuba last June
one of its major recent victories over its
“imperialist” enemies.
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Judge sentences
fake heir to 15 years
in fraud scheme
by Jim Fitzgerald
Associated Press
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. —The
son of a Wisconsin plumber who
swindled would-be investors by saying
he was the sole heir to a historic Italian
trust was sentenced Thursday to 15
years in prison by a judge who
called his scheme4 ’one of the biggest
and most outrageous frauds” he’d ever
seen.
Luigi Alexander, 55, declined to
address the court before sentencing.
Alexander, who is eligible for
parole in five years, also declined to
withdraw the guilty plea he entered
in February, despite an earlier denial
of committing grand larceny and
scheming to defraud. Alexander was
arrested last year in a sting operation
during which he accepted a $1.8
million check from an investigator.
In court, Bryan McNelis testified
that Alexander bilked him of $835,000
and took $600,000 from his brother
and $60,000 front his73-year-old
mother, who now ‘ ’has to go look for
a job.”
Prosecutors said Alexander drove
a Land Rover and a Bentley and
affected cosmopolitan airs. He had an
office in Larchmont that featured the
fake D’Ellessandr’O family crest on
the ceiling. His Web site boasted of
degrees from nonexistent schools and
purported that the D’Ellessandr’O
family had successfully invested for
the Vatican and Italian nobility.
Alexander eventually admitted he was
bom in Waukesha, Wis., rather than
in Switzerland, and had done prison
time for fraud in Texas and Belgium.
News Briefs
■ Doctors to implant
first self-contained
total artificial heart
WASHINGTON (AP) - An
American on the brink of death soon
will receive the first self-contained,
mechanical total heart replacement in
a landmark suigery experts hope will
lead to new hope for patients with fail
ing hearts. Heart suigery teams at five
hospitals are trained and poised to re
move a diseased natural heart and in
stall in its place an electric-powered
pump designed to fit inside the chest
with no wires or tubes sticking %
through the skin. Officials of Abiomed
Inc., which developed the mechanical
heart, said Wednesday that the first
suigery, no later than June 30, would
proceed without prior announcement
and that the patient’s identity may not
be released. Results of the procedure,
they said, would not be made known
to the public for at least 30 days.
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