Cedar Rapids - Tell me what to say, council member Brian Fagan suggested last night, standing on dry ground atop downtown rail tracks, looking back toward the city's signature City Hall in the middle of the Cedar River.

    It was all water between him and City Hall, and far beyond.

    "I just can't believe it," Fagan said. "You caught me at a time when I just don't have the words. I'm sure someone will pin it (down), and I'll maybe grasp on to that. But right now, I just don't have the words."

    And it is beyond words:

The city's water supply is in drastically limited supply after power was cut to both water treatment plants. The plants, operating on generators, are allowing the city to pump at only 25 percent of capacity. The city is asking - begging - residents to limit water use to drinking only.

The Cedar is now supposed to reach a crest today of 32 feet - 12 feet above the river's 20-foot record, and 10 feet above where, three days ago, the crest was supposed to be headed.

More than 3,200 homes and hundreds of businesses have been flooded. Thousands more have water in their basements, as rain continued to fall Thursday.

8,000 people have been evacuated from their homes.

The sanitary sewer lift station at Edgewood Road and Ellis Road NW failed, putting some homes to the north and west - far from the flood - in danger of basement sewage backups.

Electrical power was out to 14,850 customers in Linn County and 1,025 in Johnson County last night, including most of the downtown. Those without power now may be without power for some days, Alliant Energy has warned.

All the city's downtown bridges are closed, leaving only Interstate 380 to carry slow-moving, jampacked traffic. Later in the day, bridges over Highway 30 and Highway 13 closed. Interstate 80, one of the nation's major east-west routes, closed last night at the Tipton exit east of Iowa City.

In addition to City Hall, water is in the Linn County Courthouse and the Linn County Jail, both on May's Island, and the federal courthouse at First Avenue and First Street SE.

The city's two hospitals are operating on backup power and, for the short term, have canceled elective surgeries.

    "We're losing almost all the battles," said Dave Wallace, the city's storm water engineer.

    What had been unimaginable the day before became reality as rain pounded anew on the city and its river.

    Early Thursday, breaks in temporary additions made to the earthen levee at the Time Check Neighborhood sent water toward the more than 1,000 homes and businesses in that northwest Cedar Rapids neighborhood. Some residents were still there, not having left with the city's mandatory evacuation order of the day before. Firefighters in boats spent the early morning rescuing those trapped inside.

    No one apparently was injured.

    With daylight came hard rain, filling Prairie Creek and other tributaries feeding the Cedar River, creating flash flooding into the Cedar River.

    Public Works Director Dave Elgin said models for predicting flood levels don't take into account how the levels change when a rail bridge with hopper cars filled with rock collapses into a river and a river overruns a bunch of other bridges.

    The city had spent the last several days implementing its flood action plan designed to keep the city safe from a 100-year flood, a level never before seen.

    What marched into the city early Thursday was water at the level of a 500-year flood - one that has a 1 in 500 chance of occurring in any given year - if not something more, Elgin said.

    A 100-year flood hits Cedar Rapids when the river climbs to 22.5 feet and the 500-year flood is at 26.5 feet.

    On Thursday afternoon, Elgin had no time to worry about just where the city's levee protection might have failed in the Time Check Neighborhood. The entire levee, thought to provide protection to about 22.5 feet, was well under water by then.

    "It could have been built out of concrete," Elgin said. "We were doomed."

    People who have not seen the river up close will have trouble imaging what it has done.

    May's Island has all but disappeared into the river.

    Water was in the streets and in the buildings in the heart of downtown, and it was deeper and stretched much farther on the west side of the river. Some one-story buildings there - such as the Dairy Queen on First Avenue NE - were submerged.

    At an afternoon news conference, Mayor Kay Halloran called the flood both a "devastating" event and a "tragic" one. "Recovery from this event will take a long time," she said.

    The mayor said the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, R. David Paulison, and Iowa Sens. Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin are expected in the city today, as are U.S. Rep. Dave Loebsack and representatives from the U.S. Small Business Administration.

    City Manager Jim Prosser said Cedar Rapids' flood plan was designed to protect the city from 100-year floods, not something of this scope.

    "That's a massive difference in terms of the volume of water," he said. "It's not arithmetic. It's logarithmic. That's why you're astounded. It's why we're all astounded."

    The assessment of what the city should plan for - and pay for - can wait another day, he said.

    Now, he said, is the time for "compassion."