In the Mississippi Delta, Tim Saxton is still praying for the levees to hold — not the levees on the Mississippi River, but the ones on his 500-acre catfish farm. Saxton is not sure how bad Five Mile Fisheries was damaged because it’s still under water. So he waits. And wonders.

“It’s going to be tough on a 60-year-old man to start over, but I’m sure going to try,” Saxton vowed.

The levees divided the farm into dozens of small ponds for different-sized fish. If he has to rebuild all of those levees, the financial blow will be crippling. Even if the levees survive, it could take Saxton a year or more to get back into production.

He’s not the only one starting over. The mobile home park in Memphis, Tenn., where Leandro Lugo lived with his pregnant wife and two young children, is abandoned, like “something out of a movie.” Many of the mobile homes were flooded to their roofs. Red stickers mark the ones that are unlivable.

Lugo and his family were among the first to arrive at the Hope Presbyterian Church shelter. Most of the 177 people who stayed there have left for rented apartments or hotel rooms paid for by the federal government. And after more than a month, Lugo and his family left, too. The bed of Lugo’s white pickup truck was filled with donated items like baby diapers, chairs and a small bed for his kids.

“We were a little frustrated at one time, but we realized that we couldn’t control what God has in store for us,” said Lugo, a 37-year-old construction worker. “We have to keep moving forward. We can’t look back.”

Some were more fortunate.

Hundreds of people living along Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River heeded mandatory evacuation orders when the Army Corps of Engineers opened the Morganza floodway north of Baton Rouge for the first time since 1973. The corps had warned residents of Butte LaRose that diverting the Mississippi River’s flood waters into the Atchafalaya basin could inundate the town.

Several weeks later, that dire forecast hasn’t come close to fruition. The slowly rising water has damaged a few homes in Butte LaRose but spared the vast majority. The mandatory evacuation order has been lifted.

“I said I wanted to give Mother Nature a run for her money. We won this time, but we don’t know if we’ll win the next time,” said Maxim Doucet, a 37-year-old construction company owner who spent thousands of dollars preparing. He built a 6-foot levee around his home on the banks of the Atchafalaya River.

St. Martin Parish President Guy Cormier, who ordered the evacuation, credited the Army Corps of Engineers and National Weather Service for keeping him informed but said he was frustrated the projections were so far off.

“Once this is all said and done, I’m going to want some answers about how they missed this by 4 1/2 feet,” he said.

Farther downstream in Morgan City, even worse conditions were predicted. So far, the oil and seafood hub hasn’t seen any significant backwater flooding, said Mayor Tim Matte. However, it could be another month before the water levels cease to be a concern. That’s left officials consumed with flood preparations at a time they’d normally be focused on the start of hurricane season on June 1. The season is expected to be busier than normal, with government forecasters predicting there could be as many as 18 named tropical storms.

The overestimated flood projections were based on the best data available at the time, corps spokesman Ken Holder said. But the corps didn’t open as many gates on the Morganza floodway as initially anticipated, while drought conditions apparently blunted the impact of river water diverted into the basin.

“We plan for the worst and hope for the best — and we got the best,” Holder said. “When officials are charged with protecting public safety, they don’t have the luxury of not planning for the worst.”

Still, the Bonnet Carre spillway is pouring fresh water into Lake Pontchartain, near New Orleans. Eventually, the river water will enter the Gulf of Mexico, raising fears the fragile oyster beds, hit hard by last year’s BP oil spill, could suffer again.

Even if the flooding wasn’t as bad as initially feared, it’s still been treacherous for those affected. Some 5,600 people have applied for government assistance in Mississippi in Tennessee, though the damage is still being assessed because high waters are still causing problems for officials.

And it could take another month to know the extent of damage to catfish farming, said Roger Barlow, president of the Catfish Institute and executive vice president of Catfish Farmers of America, a trade group. Mississippi is the leading U.S. producer of farm-raised catfish, an economic mainstay that generates $200 million in annual sales in the state. It’s also not yet clear if the flood will increase prices for consumers.

Meanwhile, early estimates indicate flooding swamped 450,000 acres of cropland and caused more than $250 million in damages to agriculture in Mississippi alone, said Laura Hipp, a spokeswoman for Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. However, an exact measure of the damage is not yet available because thousands of acres are still flooded.

Nonetheless, some row crop farmers still hope to salvage part of the season. Brett Robinson hopes to start planting soybeans Monday on a small fraction of his land to replace the corn he lost, but most of his land near Yazoo City, Miss., is still flooded. Even the parts he could plant may be littered with logs or other debris.

“We’re hoping to just drop down there with a planter,” Robinson said. “But we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Kunzelman reported from New Orleans. Sainz reported from Memphis, Tenn.

“Pretty much the damage has been done,” Borghoff said.

The crest is just shy of the record of 48.7 feet recorded during a devastating 1937 flood in Memphis.

The soaking was isolated to low-lying neighborhoods, and forced hundreds of people from their homes, but no new serious flooding was expected. Officials trusted the levees would hold and protect the city’s world-famous musical landmarks, from Graceland to Beale Street.

“The levees are performing as designed I’m happy to report,” Army Corps of Engineers Col. Vernie Reichling Jr. said Tuesday on CBS’s “The Early Show.”

Still, the corps’ Memphis commander added: “I think we’ll breathe a sigh of relief once this crest has passed and is in the Gulf of Mexico.”

To the south, residents in the Mississippi Delta prepared for the worst. Farmers built homemade levees to protect their crops and engineers diverted water into a lake to ease the pressure levees around New Orleans. Inmates in the Louisiana’s largest prison were also evacuated to higher ground.

Scott Haynes, 46, estimated he would spend more than $80,000 on contractors to build levees around his house and grain silos, which hold 200,000 bushels of rice that he can’t get out before the water comes. Heavy equipment has been mowing down his wheat fields to get to the dirt that is being used to build the levees, and he expected nearly all of his farmland to flood.

“That wheat is going to be gone, anyway,” said Haynes, who lives in Carter, Miss., about 35 miles east of the Mississippi River. “We don’t know if we’re doing the right thing or not, but we can’t not do it.”

He knows time is not on his side. “I’ve got to get back on that dozer,” he said, before walking away.

Nearby, Ed Jordan (pronounced JER’-din) pointed to a high-water mark of about 7 feet in the family’s old general store left by the deadly flood of 1927. Floods have taken crops since then, but the Mississippi River hasn’t swamped their homes in generations.

He was afraid it will happen this time.

“We have 400 acres of beautiful wheat that’s almost ready for harvest. We have about a thousand acres of corn that’s chest high and just waiting on a combine (to harvest it). That’s going to be gone,” Jordan said. “I don’t know what is going to happen to our houses.”

Similar scenes played out across the Mississippi Delta, the flatlands that stretch about 200 miles from Memphis to Vicksburg, Miss. Shelters were open and farmers were already applying for federal aid.

In Memphis, an NBA playoff game featuring the Memphis Grizzlies at the FedEx Forum downtown wasn’t affected Monday night, but a barbecue contest this weekend is being moved to higher ground.

Other popular sites were also spared, including Sun Studio, where Elvis Presley made some of the recordings that helped him become king of rock ‘n’ roll and Stax Records, which launched the careers of Otis Redding and the Staple Singers.

Graceland, Presley’s former estate several miles south of downtown, was in no danger either.

“I want to say this: Graceland is safe. And we would charge hell with a water pistol to keep it that way and I’d be willing to lead the charge,” said Bob Nations Jr., director of the Shelby County Emergency Management Agency.

Talking about the river levels, he later added: “They’re going to recede slowly, it’s going to be rather putrid, it’s going to be expensive to clean up, it’s going to be labor-intensive.”

Because of heavy rain over the past few weeks and snowmelt along the upper reaches of the Mississippi, the river has broken high-water records upstream and inundated low-lying towns and farmland. The water on the Mississippi is so high that the rivers and creeks that feed into it are backed up, and that has accounted for some of the worst of the flooding so far.

Because of the levees and other defenses built since the cataclysmic Great Flood of 1927 that killed hundreds of people, engineers say it is unlikely any major metropolitan areas will be inundated as the high water pushes downstream over the next week or so. Nonetheless, they are cautious because of the risk of levee failures, as shown during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

In Louisiana, the Corps partially opened a spillway that diverts the Mississippi into a lake to ease pressure on the levees in greater New Orleans. As workers used cranes to remove some of the Bonnet Carre Spillway’s wooden barriers, hundreds of people watched from the riverbank.

The spillway, which the Corps built about 30 miles upriver from New Orleans in response to the flood of 1927, was last opened in 2008. Monday marked the 10th time it has been opened since the structure was completed in 1931.

Rufus Harris Jr., 87, said his family moved to New Orleans in 1927 only months after the disaster. He was too young to remember those days, but the stories he heard gave him respect for the river.

“People have a right to be concerned in this area because there’s always a possibility of a levee having a defective spot,” Harris said as he watched water rush out.

The Corps has also asked for permission to open a spillway north of Baton Rouge for the first time since 1973. Officials warned residents that even if it is opened, they can expect water 5 to 25 feet deep over parts of seven parishes. Some of Louisiana’s most valuable farmland is expected to be inundated.

At the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, home of the state’s death row, officials started moving prisoners with medical problems to another prison as backwaters began to rise. The prisoners were moved in buses and vans under police escort.

The prison holds more than 5,000 inmates and is bordered on three sides by the Mississippi. The prison has not flooded since 1927, though prisoners have been evacuated from time to time when high water threatened, most recently in 1997.

Associated Press writers Michael Kunzelman in Norco, La.; Mary Foster in Angola, La.; Jim Salter in St. Louis and Chuck Bartels in Little Rock contributed to this report.

The Memphis mayor said disasters such as Katrina have shown that you can’t simply get the word out by issuing warnings on TV. Authorities spent the weekend knocking on doors to tell a couple hundred people that they should abandon their homes before they are swamped by waters from the rising Mississippi. Wharton said officials are returning to some houses multiple times.

“Door-to-door is a key thing that we’re doing,” he said, adding there are stepped up patrols to prevent looting in areas where people have left their homes behind.

Forecaster Joe Lowery of the National Weather Service office in Memphis said it looks like the river is starting to level out and could crest as soon as Monday night, at or near 48 feet (14.63 meters). Forecasters had previously predicted the crest would come Tuesday.

Memphis residents have been abandoning low-lying homes for days as the dangerously surging river threatened to crest just shy of the 48.7-foot (14.84-meter) record, set by a devastating 1937 flood.

The swollen river has swamped houses in Memphis and threatens to consume many more, but its rise has been slow enough that some people were clinging to their normal lives just a bit longer.

In all, residents in more than 1,300 homes have been told to go, and some 370 people were staying in shelters.

But while some evacuated, others came as spectators. At Beale Street, the famous thoroughfare known for blues music, dozens gawked and snapped photos as water pooled at the end of the road. Traffic was heavy downtown on a day the streets would normally be quiet.

The river is “probably the biggest tourist attraction in Memphis,” said Scott Umstead, who made the half-hour drive from Collierville with his wife and their three children.

Col. Vernie Reichling, Army Corps of Engineers commander for the Memphis district, said the homes in most danger of flooding are in areas not protected by levees or floodwalls, including near Nonconnah Creek and the Wolf and Loosahatchie rivers.

About 150 Corps workers were walking along levees and monitoring performance of pump stations along what Reichling called the “wicked” Mississippi. “There should be no concern for any levees to fail,” he said in a downtown park on a bluff overlooking the river.

For Cedric Blue, the flooding in his south Memphis neighborhood near the overflowing Nonconnah Creek is a source of frustration and anger.

Blue, 39, has watched as the water engulfed three homes on his street, including that of an older woman who had to be rescued in a boat because she had refused to leave. Blue fears the rising water will ruin his house and his belongings while washing away a lifetime of memories that were created there.

Sunday afternoon, a garbage can floated in the high water near his house. Some feet away, the water had reached more than halfway up a yellow “No Outlet” street sign.

He became emotional talking about how he has about 7 feet of water in his backyard and less than a foot inside the house, which his mother owns. They were in the middle of a remodeling project when the flood hit.

Blue said he wants the city, county or the federal government to give him a hotel voucher so he does not have to go to a shelter.

“I just want a new life and relocation,” Blue said. “I would like the elected officials to come down here to see this with their own eyes and see what we’re going through.”

Flood waters were about a half-mile (800 meters) from the Beale Street’s world-famous nightspots, which are on higher ground.

The river already reached record levels in some areas upstream, thanks to heavy rains and snowmelt. It spared Kentucky and northwest Tennessee any catastrophic flooding and no deaths have been reported there, but some low lying towns and farmland along the banks of the river have been inundated.

And there’s tension farther south in the Mississippi Delta and Louisiana, where the river could create a slow-developing disaster.

There’s so much water in the Mississippi that the tributaries that feed into it are also backed up, creating some of the worst flood problems so far.

Downriver in Louisiana, the Army Corps of Engineers began opening the first floodgates at the Bonnet Carre spillway about 30 miles northwest of New Orleans. Workers pulled restraining devices off 28 of the spillway’s 350 gates, and the corps said it will monitor river levels before deciding to open more.

It’s the 10th time the spillway has opened since the structure was completed in 1931.

The corps also has asked for permission to open the key Morganza spillway north of Baton Rouge. Officials warned residents that even if it were opened, residents could expect water 5 to 25 feet (1.5 to 7.5 meters) deep over parts of seven parishes. Some of Louisiana’s most valuable farmland is expected to be inundated.

Later on Monday, state officials planned to begin moving some prisoners from the Angola state penitentiary, north of Baton Rouge.

Engineers say it is unlikely any major metropolitan areas will be inundated as the water pushes downstream over the next week or two. Nonetheless, officials are cautious.

Since the flood of 1927, a disaster that killed hundreds, Congress has made protecting the cities on the lower Mississippi a priority, spending billions to fortify cities with floodwalls and carve out overflow basins and ponds — a departure from the “levees-only” strategy that led to the 1927 disaster

Associated Press writer Michael Kunzelman contributed to this report from Norco, La.

“It’s the biggest mistake you made since Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl,” he jokingly warned, alluding to the MTV-produced Super Bowl halftime flesh show that created a firestorm earlier this year.

There may have been plenty of sex appeal on show in Miami — cleavage was the main fashion trend for women, cool colors for men — but little shock appeal on hand.

MTV was ready, though, using a several-second tape delay for the first time. The audio delay, used for years, was in heavy use during the hip-hop medley, which featured Lil Jon, Petey Pablo and Fat Joe.

The change of scenery for the awards, typically held in New York or Los Angeles, helped raise the decadence level at the celebrity-soaked affair, held at the downtown AmericanAirlines Arena.

OutKast’s vivid “Hey Ya!”–_ perhaps best described as the old Ed Sullivan show on acid — won four awards, including video of the year. Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” the most nominated video with six, also won four. That gritty black-and-white video depicts the singer’s own killing as a metaphor for his much-ballyhooed retirement.

“I felt like I was trying to push the envelope,” Jay-Z, dressed in a dapper white suit and hat, said as he accepted an award _ called a moonman after the channel’s logo _ for best rap video. “That was my punishment and this is my reward.”

Usher won his first moonman as he took best male video for “Yeah!”

“This is my first time coming up here — let me take my time with this,” a beaming Usher said. “I’m so damned happy right now I don’t wanna leave.”

As usual, the awards were an afterthought to explosive performances and surprise cameos.

Alicia Keys gave a dramatic, soulful spin of her hit “If I Ain’t Got You,” and was buoyed by Stevie Wonder on harmonica. Moments later, she joined Wonder and Lenny Kravitz as they sang a classic Wonder hit, “Higher Ground.”

Keys also appeared on stage to honor the late Ray Charles, who died in June.

The daughters of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and President Bush made an appearance _ the Bush daughters on videotape — to urge people to vote. Even the Rev. Al Sharpton made an appearance connected to voting — not for the election, though, but for the viewer’s choice award.

Acclaimed rap newcomer Kanye West staged a dramatic version of “Jesus Walks,” then instead of using a Chaka Khan sample for his hit “Through the Wire,” brought the R&B veteran onstage to sing the real thing.

In a strange stunt, Flaming Lips singer Wayne Coyne appeared on stage enclosed in a big plastic ball pushed by fans on the arena floor. But perhaps the most surreal, and bizarre, performance came from the Polyphonic Spree, the twenty-something member rock choir that performed in multicolored, choirlike robes. They looked like members of a lost cult from the 1970s.

There also was an appearance by uber-twins Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. Mary Kate, who recently was treated for an eating disorder, alluded to her ordeal before introducing Jessica Simpson.

“Thank you to everyone _ you have been very supportive for the last couple of months,” said Mary Kate.

It was one of the few subdued moments during the lavish night.

Usher and Simpson arrived on the red carpet not by car, but by luxury yacht. Simpson, glamorously attired in a white dress with a silver bodice, arrived with husband and “Newlyweds” co-star Nick Lachey in a 68-foot boat.

The biggest entrance, of course, came from P. Diddy. Dressed in a white suit and with a Mohawk haircut, he arrived in a towering yacht along with Ma$e, Naomi Campbell and Bruce Willis.

The scene outside the arena was frenzied before the show. Performers such as Ashlee Simpson and Jadakiss rocked an energetic crowd while stars walked the red carpet, showing off their fashions _ or lack thereof. Lil’ Kim looked anything but, as she almost busted out of the skimpy top of her flowing dress.

The show, held a day before the Republican convention was to kick off in New York City, ended on a patriotic note, as red, white and blue balloons fell from the rafters and fans held “vote” signs during OutKast’s closing performance.