Flood misery continues to engulf US Midwest*

Floods from a week of thunderstorms in the US Midwest have swamped
thousands of homes and cut power to hundreds of thousands of people.

Further rain has pushed the floodwater higher in northern Illinois where
people are using sandbags in a bid to keep back the rising Des Plaines
river.

Seventeen deaths are attributed to the weather after early estimates of 25.

But weather forecasts suggest the storms have eased off in the Chicago
area at least.

The states of Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota are cleaning up after their
earlier flooding.

Michigan has also been battered by heavy storms, including tornadoes
which destroyed or damaged several homes.

'Getting worse'

In the Chicago suburb of Prospect Heights, hundreds of people were
piling sandbags against 1-m (4-ft) concrete barriers along the Des
Plaines on Friday.

"It's just getting worse," fire chief Don Gould told |the Associated Press.

"All these people will be flooded out if we don't move quick."

More than half a million utility customers were left by the storms
without power in the Chicago area and about 148,000 remained without
electricity on Friday night

A hospital in Dyer, Indiana, to the south-east of Chicago, was being
evacuated as water from a flooded creek seeped in.