Sandbags, heartbreak, and help

It's a warm Illinois afternoon, and in the Warren High School parking lot, retirees, soccer moms, and volunteers from the naval base are pouring, tying, piling, loading, and pouring and tying again. Music blares from a red Jeep as endless lines of sandbaggers laugh at dark humor and discover neighbors they've never met.

Brittany Bernard, a Warren freshman in a pink shirt and bright pink nail polish, is cinching bags and giggling with her friends. School has been closed all week. "I've never seen a flood this big," she says cheerfully. "But it's really cool - people are helping."

Here in Gurnee, the floods have roused a sense of shared humanity that's often tapped by the primal threats of nature. "It's like a big melting pot out here," says Jerry Haines, a Gurnee yacht broker taking a short breather from piling bags. "Everyone's coming together." The license plate on his black truck reads "BY A BOAT" - exactly, he jokes, what people will have to do next.

After days of storms, this northern Illinois town is a landscape changed: Hundreds of thousands of sandbags are lumped into low, sagging walls along the roads, cars have disappeared, homes have become small islands, and families call out to each other from motorboats, or wave oars in acknowledgment from small canoes.

The battle against nature's power is a scene playing out across the Midwest. The Des Plaines River water that has drowned this town is just the latest disaster in a week of wild weather as tornadoes, thunderstorms, and floods sweep through towns from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania. Two people have died - one in an Illinois thunderstorm, one in a Nebraska tornado - but overall, the toll has been surprisingly light.

These aren't the first floods for Gurnee. Many here remember the storms of 1986, when the river rose a record 11.9 feet - nearly 5 feet above flood stage - and caused $100 million in damages. There were smaller floods in 1993 and 2000. Early this week, residents here and 25 miles downstream, in the town of Des Plaines, were bracing for worse. But by Wednesday, the river had crested in Gurnee at 11.7 feet, according to the National Weather Service. Des Plaines residents are still waiting for the bulk of flooding, with waters expected to crest at around 9 feet on Friday, 2 feet lower than earlier predictions.

On Tuesday, as waters rose, Cathy Froman assessed the damage from her back porch. A metal fence post sticks up from the lake that has swallowed her yard.

Inside, her rooms are crammed with a decade's worth of boxes, clothes, furniture rescued from a basement that lies 10 feet below the water line. Still, hundreds of sandbags and three water pumps have kept it remarkably dry. Ms. Froman still can't believe the outpouring of help. "People called before it even got bad," she says. "It's the nice side of humanity."

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