Kansas City, Mo. --

Several levees in northern Missouri failed Sunday to hold back the surge of water being released from upstream dams.

Authorities said water began pouring over levees Saturday night and Sunday morning in Holt and Atchison counties, flooding farmland and numerous homes and cabins. A hole in the side of a Holt County levee continued to grow Sunday, deluging the state park and recreational area of Big Lake, a community of less than 200 people located 78 miles north of Kansas City.

Jud Kneuvean, chief of emergency management for the corps' Kansas City District, said the Missouri River dipped by almost 1 foot after the Big Lake breach, but the water level started to rise again by Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, the Nebraska Public Power District issued a flooding alert Sunday for its Cooper Nuclear power plant near Brownville, Neb. The declaration is the least serious of four emergency notifications established by the federal commission.

The plant was operating Sunday at full capacity, and there was no threat to plant employees or to the public, said Mark Becker, a spokesman for the utility in Columbus, Neb.

The Fort Calhoun Station, another nuclear plant along the river in eastern Nebraska, issued a similar alert June 6. That plant near Blair, Neb., has been shut down since April and will not be reactivated until the flooding subsides.

The corps said Sunday that the river level at Brownville, Neb., had surged about 2 feet from Saturday morning to Sunday morning. Water was flowing over a levee there and into farmland, but the levee was being built up to alleviate that, said Jodi Fawl, spokeswoman for the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency.

In Missouri, presiding Holt County Commissioner Mark Sitherwood said U.S. 159 is closed south of Big Lake because water is pouring over the road, and most of the west side of the community is flooded.

In neighboring Atchison County, there was a nearly steady flow of water over a half-mile stretch of a levee near U.S. 136, said Mark Manchester, deputy director of emergency management for the county. He said the water was flooding several thousand acres of farmland, but so far no homes had been inundated since a breach last Monday caused about a dozen homes to take on water.

Manchester said the river level has reached 44.6 feet, the highest on record.