美军为泄洪欲炸开密苏里段大坝.docVIP

听力课堂,开放式外语学习平台！TingC 声明：本资料由 听力课堂网站收集整理，仅供英语爱好者学习使用，资料版权属于原作者。 - PAGE 1 - 美军为泄洪欲炸开密苏里段大坝 The Army Corps of Engineers is helping residents deal with floods in the midwestern U.S. Officials are focused on a levee, the barrier thats designed to prevent floods. But theyre not building it. Theyre blowing it up! The Corps of Engineers set the charges youre seeing go off. The plan is to get rid of this levee on the Mississippi River, which will flood about 200 square miles of land in Missouri. You might be wondering how causing a flood is to supposed to help in all of this. Engineers are blowing up that levee in order to let water from the Ohio River flow into the Mississippi. Before those blasts you saw, the water level in the Ohio River was the highest its ever been. It was threatening to wipe out the entire town of Cairo, Illinois. Officials say the efforts to lower the flood waters are working. But some folks in Missouri arent happy about this. Those 200 square miles that were flooded are farms. Missouris governor says it could take tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to recover from the intentional flooding. The regional commander of the Corps of Engineers says he understands the widespread impact of this kind of situation. This is a story of the human dimension and, certainly, its impacting lots of folks. As you fly up and down the river, youll see a lot of people have already abandoned their houses and moved to higher ground. So, it is, it is a heartwrenching story. Ive been involved with flooding for 10 years, and it takes a long time to recover from something like this. Recovery Efforts Moving south to Alabama, where search and rescue teams continue to look for victims of last weeks devastating severe weather. Alabama was hit the hardest by the storms and tornadoes that tore across the southern U.S. 36 Alabama counties have been declared disaster areas by the U.S. government. That declaration frees up resources and money to help with the recovery e