VIDALIA — No one and nothing close to the banks of the Mississippi River at Natchez was prepared for 65 feet of rushing water, but the river doesn’t care.

The National Weather Service raised its predicted Natchez crest Monday afternoon from 60 feet to 65 feet, still on May 20. Both numbers are well over the record — 58.04 in 1937.

“We are in a position we’ve never been before,” Vidalia Mayor Hyram Copeland said. “And we are probably going to have to do some things we have never done before.”

Copeland, with close assistance from the U.S. Corps of Engineers, is making a plan that will be made public after a special aldermen meeting today.

Neither Copeland nor the Corps Vicksburg District office feels the levee that wraps Concordia Parish is in danger of breaking.

“We may have some issues as far as the riverfront is concerned,” Copeland said.

In addition to four buildings that sit on the riverfront — Comfort Suites hotel, Riverpark Medical Center, the Vidalia Conference and Convention Center and Promise Hospital — water pumps and electrical transmitters are located on the riverfront.

The city has 3,900 feet of a type of Corps-approved instant levee, some of which arrived Monday, that will be used on the riverfront. Other plans for the area will be finalized today, Copeland said.

The decision to raise the predicted crest came after a National Weather Service conference call Monday as a result of heavy rain to the north, NWS Meteorologist Jared Allen said.

“The Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri area is inundated, that’s an area that has not really been dry in the last couple of weeks,” Allen said. “Eventually all that water will make it into the Mississippi River basin itself.”

Allen said the predicted crest takes into consideration the precipitation that has already fallen and that which is forecast for a 24-hour period in the future.

It’s unlikely anything could make the predicted crest go down, he said.

The Corps of Engineers decided late Monday to blow up a levee in Missouri to save the Illinois town of Cairo. But that decision will have no effect on water levels in the lower Mississippi Valley, said Kavanaugh Breazeale, Corps public affairs and communications officer for the Vicksburg District.

The water is simply being diverted around Cairo, but will end up back in the Mississippi River.

Even though flooding along the river’s path to Natchez may spread the water out over typically dry land, the amount of water headed to Natchez will still be the same, Breazeale said.

Allen said the lower Mississippi valley may see a prolonged period of thunderstorms through tonight, but should clear soon.

After today, the Miss-Lou should be clear and sunny.

The river sat at 50.8 on the Natchez gauge Monday night.

It was expected to hit 51.4 today.

The river level is measured from zero on the gage, it is not a representation of how many feet of water are actually in the river bed.