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Police Department spokeswoman Anne E. Schwartz said Vliet St., between N. 12th and N. 13th streets, is blocked, and barricades have been installed so people are able to line up around the block of the building at 1220 W. Vliet St.

“That line is pretty huge,” Schwartz said. “We are going to be here for the duration.”

Police responded to the building about 7 a.m. after 2,500 people lined up on the sidewalk and eventually began to block traffic in the street. A number of people had rushed the door, and some people became caught in the crush; however, there were no serious injuries, according to Schwartz.

She did not think police had made any arrests, nor were people being asked to leave.

“We want to make sure people stay here in an orderly fashion so they can get what they came to get,” she said. “We’re still trying to figure out why so many people showed up.”

People had begun lining up at about 5 a.m.

As of 9:20 a.m., a large crowd of frustrated people remained.

Some said they heard of the reports while visiting food pantries over the weekend. Others said the word came through friends or others they know.

“It’s a mess down there,” said Lillie William, who arrived at 6:45 a.m. and already found a long line.

William said she lost about $150 of frozen meat when her power went out during the storms.

Residents in line said they were expecting to receive immediate help, but several said they were told it would be 30 to 60 days before they received any money or credits to their FoodShare debit cards.

Yvonne Love, a mother of three children, said she heard there would be immediate help while at a food pantry Saturday. She left the scene frustrated, talking briefly to a reporter before running to catch a bus to P.A. Staffing Service, a temporary employment agency.

“Now I have to try and get (to) a food pantry,” said Love, whose children are 8, 10 and 14. “I’ve got to feed my kids.”

At one point, 34 squad cars had been sent to the scene, according to police Lt. Anthony Boylan.

“It’s bad over there, apparently,” Boylan said. “They’ve got a lot of squads over there. Fights have been breaking out.”

Information was given out that the office was giving out free food vouchers, but it was only taking applications through the Federal Emergency Management Agency for food vouchers, Boylan said.

Told of the incident in Milwaukee, a FEMA spokeswoman said the agency would not be involved with food stamp distribution and was unaware of any media reports about it in the Milwaukee area.

Eileen Force, a spokeswoman for Mayor Tom Barrett, said her understanding is that applications for general flood assistance were to be taken at the location, but somehow a rumor developed related to food stamps.

Sherrie Tussler, executive director of the Hunger Task Force, said she believed that a news release issued by Gov. Jim Doyle’s office may have suggested to people that they could get food stamp aid immediately.

A news release on the governor’s Web site makes clear that people who need food assistance should go to their local county to “fill out the simple, two-page application to see if they are eligible for emergency food assistance.”

“The food stamp program is just not that fast,” Tussler said of the application process. “Your average Joe ends up in a flood situation and thinks the help will be immediate.”

Yet this vital source of investment has all but dried up. The number of first-timers this year could be the lowest on record. In 1999, almost 600,000 people bought their first property, but then soaring prices started to make homes unaffordable and that number dropped steadily. Last year it stood at 358,000 – its lowest level since 1991.

However, with prices now falling, potential first-timers are still not taking the plunge even though properties are cheaper. On current trends, they will buy barely more than 200,000 homes this year. Indeed, the total could fall below the 198,000 sales recorded in 1974 and be the lowest since records began.

In the latest bout of food inflation, beef, pork, poultry and even eggs, cheese and milk are expected to get more expensive as livestock owners go out of business or are forced to slaughter more cattle, hogs, turkeys and chickens to cope with rocketing costs for corn-based animal feed.

The floods engulfed an estimated 2 million or more acres of corn and soybean fields in Iowa, Indiana, Illinois and other key growing states, sending world grain prices skyward on fears of a substantially smaller corn crop. The government will give a partial idea of how many corn acres were lost before the end of the month, but experts say the trickle-down effect could be more dramatic later this year, affecting everything from Thanksgiving turkeys to Christmas hams.

Rod Brenneman, president and chief executive of Seaboard Foods, a pork supplier in Sawnee Mission, Kan. that produces 4 million hogs a year, said high corn costs were already forcing producers in his industry to cut back on the number of animals they raise.

“There’s definitely liquidation of livestock happening,” and that will cause meat prices to rise later this year and into 2009, said Brenneman, who is also the vice chairman of the American Meat Institute.

Brenneman’s cost for feeding a single hog has shot up $30 in the past year because of record-high prices for corn and soybeans, the main ingredients in animal feed. Passing that increase on to consumers would tack an extra 15 cents per pound onto a pork chop.

It’s a similar story for U.S. beef producers, who now spend a whopping 60-70 percent of their production costs on animal feed and are seeing that number rise daily as corn prices hover near an unprecedented $8 a bushel, up from about $4 a year ago.

“This is not sustainable. The cattle industry is going to have to get smaller,” said James Herring, president and CEO of Amarillo, Tex.-based Friona Industries, which buys 20 million bushels of corn each year to feed 550,000 cattle.

Corn’s prices were already rising before the floods, driven up 80 percent over the past year as developing countries like China and India scramble for grains to feed people and livestock. U.S. production of ethanol, an alternative fuel that can be made with corn, has also pushed prices higher, prompting livestock owners to lobby Washington to roll back ethanol mandates.

Before the floods, corn farmers were enjoying record profits selling the grain to feed animals and for use in cereals and as a sweetener in soda and candy. But a sharply smaller corn crop could wipe out those gains.

In Iowa, the No. 1 U.S. corn grower, floods inundated about 9 percent of corn crops, representing about 1.2 million acres — almost 1.5 percent of the country’s anticipated harvest.

In Indiana, another 9 percent of corn and soybean crops were flooded, potentially costing farmers up to $840 million in lost earnings, Indiana Agriculture Director Andy Miller said.

Floodwaters also tossed farm equipment, sprayed cornfields with debris and silt and sucked away large chunks of topsoil. For livestock owners and meat producers, the damage may be felt long after the corn grows back.

Even before the floods, Tyson Foods was complaining that high grain prices would drive up its costs by $600 million this year. The world’s largest poultry company has already raised its prices over the past year, and expects to keep raising them, CEO Dick Bond told analysts at a conference in May.

Higher feed prices will eventually filter through to the cost of milk, cheese and yogurt, too, since 65 to 75 percent of a dairy farmers’ production costs are for feed, said Chris Galen, a spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation.

With the cost of animal feed only going higher, many poultry and dairy farmers are starting to look for cheaper alternatives.

Nebraska dairy farmer Dan Rice, who has 1,500 cows, said one alternative is to buy some of the byproducts of cereal or flour production, but they’re not nearly as productive compared to corn.

“If we all feed less corn and get less production, then the price at the grocery stores are going to go up,” said Rice, who supplies milk to grocery stores in Omaha and around Kansas City.

Without easy ways to cut costs, many livestock producers will have little choice but to slaughter more animals and send them to market.

“We’re in survival mode now,” said Paul Hill, chairman of West Liberty Foods, a turkey processor based in West Liberty, Iowa. He estimated U.S. turkey producers will reduce their flocks by 10 to 15 percent nationwide, a cutback that will send consumer prices dramatically higher.

“The cost of Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys will go up this year, and maybe even more next year,” said Hill, who is also the chairman of the National Turkey Federation.

If corn were to rise to $10 a bushel, Richard Lobb, spokesman for the National Chicken Council, said recouping costs through higher retail prices may not be possible.

His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit — despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don’t exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.

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Calculations by the Sunday Star-Times show that on the average Kiwi wage of $45,000 a year, a worker needs to toil away for 17 hours a week just to keep their family fed and their car fuelled. That is because food prices have gone up by 11.8 per cent in the past year, while petrol prices have jumped 34 per cent. By contrast, wages for most people have risen by only about 3 per cent.

…

A backbench MP earning $126,000 before tax needs to work about seven hours a week to cover grocery and petrol costs, while high-paying chief executives earning an average of $300,000 need to do just three hours of work a week.

“We’re basically experiencing total shutdown,” said Larry Daily, president of Alter Barge Line Inc. of Bettendorf, Iowa.

While the bottleneck is costing him and other barge operators tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue per day, June is a slow shipping period on the river compared with the late-summer harvest, the shutdown is expected to last only a few weeks, and it involves primarily non-perishable goods. So no major damage to the economy is expected.

Among the freight being held up: corn and soybeans headed downstream for New Orleans, where grain is loaded onto ships for export. Construction supplies and petroleum products headed upstream on the Mississippi are not getting through either.

Because of the high water, the Army Corps of Engineers has closed 13 locks along the upper Mississippi since June 12. As of Friday, nine locks remained closed, a roughly 215-mile stretch between Illinois City, Ill., and Winfield, Mo., northwest of St. Louis.

The situation along the Mississippi in Missouri was improving Friday as government forecasters predicted crests sharply below 1993’s record levels. Several communities up and down the Mississippi were still under inundated, however, including Lincoln County, Mo., where 300 to 350 homes were flooded after the water flowed over or through the levees.

In Old Monroe, 45 miles north of St. Louis, retired steelworker Bob Scott watched as the river puddled at the edge of his front yard. But he said he thought the river had stopped rising and his home might come through the flood unscathed.

“It’s kind of harrowing, a lot of sleepless nights, worried about your property,” said Scott, 61. “You work all your life for what little bit you get.”

The locks use huge electric motors to open and close gates and valves, floating the barges up and down to different levels of the river as they make their way up and down the river. When the river floods, the Corps removes the motors to protect them from the water. When the locks shut down, barges can still move between them, but no farther.

Typically, a towboat pushes as many as 15 barges, each of them 12 feet high and 200 feet long, lashed together with steel cable. A single barge carries the equivalent of about 55 tractor-trailers.

Last year, between June 12 and July 1, 180 tows (a “tow” is a towboat and its set of barges) carried more than 2.5 million tons of goods through now-closed Lock 25 at Winfield. During that same period, 166 tows carrying 2.3 million tons of cargo passed through Lock 19, at Keokuk, Iowa, now closed, too.

As of Thursday, eight to 10 tows were stranded or sidelined on the upper part of the Mississippi River, said Lynn Muench, senior vice president at American Waterways Operators, an industry group.

“On a typical day at this time of year, there would be 40 to 60 tows on the upper Mississippi River, and the average tow carries the equivalent of 900 semi-trucks of product,” she said.

Daily, the Iowa barge operator, said that he had 100 barges and two boats stranded at places along the river with such cargo as corn, soybeans, fertilizer, cement, animal feed, scrap metal and wind turbine towers. He estimated his business was losing $25,000 a day, and said that could rise to $40,000 when two more of his boats go idle soon.