U.S. 61 North at Redwood was ordered closed to traffic at noon today, hours after U.S. 61 South was closed at the Big Black River.

Wild boars were reported crossing the Mississippi River near Riverfront Park this morning, forcing the evacuation of people using the playground and picnic facilities.

Rain, moving in this morning, was expected to continue much of the day, threatening flash flooding in bayous, creeks and tributaries that could not empty into the swollen Mississippi River.

Pockets of seepage could be seen along the Mississippi Mainline Levee in Madison Parish near Vicksburg Tallulah Regional Airport, though the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reiterated its confidence in its levee system intended to hold control of the raging river.

Numbers released this morning by Warren County emergency management officials showed 1,085 homes, 437 of those as primary dwellings, have been evacuated in Warren County, displacing an estimated 1,711 people.

Fourteen people were reported at the only Red Cross shelter set up in the city Thursday night, at Hawkins United Methodist Church on Halls Ferry Road.

The Mississippi River level at Vicksburg was at 55.5 feet this morning, up nine-tenths of a foot in 24 hours, as the mighty, muddy water marched toward a predicted crest at Vicksburg of 57.5 feet on Thursday, topping the historic 1927 flood by 1.3 feet.

Flooding has inundated the flood-prone Ford and Kings communities in northwest Vicksburg, swamped large swaths of farmland in north and south Warren County and covered areas near two proposed downtown museums in Vicksburg.

Today’s rainfall, forecast to be about one-half inch in Warren County, could cause some flash flooding in backwater areas where ditches are already full of water, but it is not expected to affect the flood’s crest, said Marty Pope, hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Jackson.

“They have had substantial rainfall over parts of Arkansas, and we are still evaluating things to see if it will cause the high water in Vicksburg to last a little bit longer,” Pope said. “We won’t necessarily see an increase in the crest.”

Pope said current models show the river receding below flood stage between June 8 and 15.

The highway closures, ordered by the Mississippi Department of Transportation, continued Thursday night when U.S. 61 South at the Big Black River was shut down at 7:30. The northbound lanes of U.S. 61 North were to be closed at Blakely today at noon while the southbound lanes were to close at Floweree, cutting off Redwood Road’s access to the four-lane highway.

On Thursday, standing atop the Yazoo Backwater Levee, Col. Jeff Eckstein, commander of the Vicksburg District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, told reporters what his organization is expecting.

“With the projections we have for the water coming up, we’re going to overtop this levee,” he said. “There’s a tremendous potential impact. The group we’ve assembled to add a layer of protection and reduce the risk to all those people who live behind the levee is tremendous.”

Black, high-density polyvinyl held in place by sandbags covers the levee on its westernmost 4 miles, deemed by the Corps of Engineers to be most vulnerable to floodwater rising above the 28-mile earthen structure. Engineers say its lowest spots are now elevated to 107 feet, 4 feet above its original design. Absorbent sand bins shore up the 28-mile system’s connection with the mainline levee system, which stretches 163 miles in the state.

Flows on the river past the Vicksburg gauge were recorded Thursday at 2,102,000 cubic feet per second, Eckstein said. The record daily flow is 2,116,000 cubic feet, in 1937, he said. The backwater levee, completed in 1978, protects 4,000 structures across 1.2 million acres in the South Delta. The Steele Bayou Control Structure holds water out of the backwater area. Stages there this morning read 89.9 on the land side and 105.0 on the river side.

On the levee Thursday, Peter Nimrod, engineer for the Board of Mississippi Levee Commissioners, also addressed reporters.

“I’m surrounded by heroes,” he said. “We knew this levee was low, we knew this levee was designed to overtop. It’s not designed to fail.”

A troublesome set of sand boils on the mainline levee at Buck Chute just west of Eagle Lake was a “first big headache,” Nimrod said. Over the past three weeks, a 2-acre berm was built to trap the boils and the lake has been raised nearly 12 feet to ease water pressure on the levee from the east.

Covering the levee with the tar paper-like sheet cost about $2.5 million, Eckstein said. Vicksburg-based Fordice Construction and Richfield, Ohio-based American Environmental Group laid the mat, provided by Houston-based GSE. Costs on emergency, in-house work on Buck Chute, a closing structure where Paw Paw Road crosses the mainline levee and the sand bins were still being calculated, said Jimmy Coldiron, of the District’s River Operations Maintenance Section.

In northeast Louisiana, the old mainline levee in East Carroll Parish abandoned in the 1930s was overtopped Wednesday night, flooding about 10,000 acres of farmland in the sparsely populated corner of the state. Sand boils have been noted up and down the mainline levee in four parishes. Water has seeped onto farmland in Madison Parish, less than a mile north of Vicksburg Tallulah Regional Airport. Such scenes are routine and the official mainline levee, which snakes through East Carroll, Madison, Tensas and Concordia parishes should hold up fine, district president Reynold Minsky said.

“We have no problems that we are concerned about there,” Minsky said of the seepage. “There’s plenty of seepwater in Madison Parish. It’s normal.”

Most of the district’s planned improvements are around Vidalia, where the district expected to award a third phase of plans to enlarge levees by 4 feet sometime this year. Sandbags and sand bins have formed part of a frantic effort to protect parts of town on the river side of the mainline levee.

On the Mississippi side, a contract is in place to raise the mainline levee at Mayersville by 2 feet and a sand boil at Rosedale, in Bolivar County, has been bagged with 5 feet of sandbags and filled, Eckstein said.

The wild boars were reported in the northwest part of Riverfront Park at about 9:15 this morning, spotted by a security guard at the flood-closed DiamondJacks Casino.

“We haven’t seen them yet, but we think they’re in the bushes,” Vicksburg Deputy Police Chief John Dolan said by phone from the park that is bordered by a kudzu-covered bluff leading up to Washington Street.

Wild boars, which weigh as much as 200 pounds and are sometimes aggressive, are known to travel in sounders, or groups, as large as 50.

The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks was on the way to the park this morning, Dolan said, after park-users had been ordered to leave and the public was kept out.

Strategies to address the post-flood aftermath at the Yazoo Backwater Levee are in the infancy stage, Eckstein said.

“We haven’t come up with a plan, but we’re doing the assessment of what this flood’s going to do,” Eckstein said. “We just won’t look at this part where we’ve had problems. We’ll look at the entire system, see how it performed, and then come up with a way on how to protect it. If we have another event, our goal is to have the same confidence in our system as we have this year.”