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Wait-and-see mode

Posted January 30, 2016 10:00 pm

By Pete Spitler Staff Writer

It's wait-and-see time for the region's levee districts as Federal Emergency Management Agency officials assess damaged areas across the state next week.

Meeting for the first time since the "Flash" Flood of '15 subsided, commissioners from Monroe and Randolph County levee districts - along with representatives from a variety of agencies - converged in Prairie du Rocher last Thursday.

Discussion topics ranged from squashing false information on social media to the need for levee maps in community locations to perceived design flaws in the federal levee system itself.

"The people need to know where they are at in the district," said Steve Gonzalez, a member of the Prairie du Rocher/Modoc District Board. "We had people on the bluff evacuating and they didn't need to."

Calling himself "the lone dissenter in the room," Brian Mehrtens - of the Columbia Drainage and Levee District - stated that design flaws discovered during the Great Flood of 1993 have neither been corrected nor discussed since.

"I think 2015 is a wakeup call to everybody in this room," he said. "Something has to be done to stop this cascading down.

"If we go, we all go."

The Mississippi River at the Chester gauge reached 45.99 feet on Jan. 2, the second-highest level on record and trailing only the 49.7 feet reached in 1993.

But the speed of the water's rise - surpassing the 1995 flood in a reported 10 days - is what caught many by surprise, along with it being a rare December flood.

"What keeps me up all night is not that it came at an unusual time, but the fact that it can come at an unusual time," Mehrtens said.

Mehrtens noted that the combined Monroe/Randolph County levee system, sections of which date back to World War II, is slowly lowering due to sediment buildup from the rivers the levees were designed to hold back.

"The system we need is some sort of spillway on the south side and build the north up," he said. "Somewhere along the lines, somebody has to start talking about this."

Mehrtens added that the commissioners needed to be vigilant on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River if St. Louis starts building up its levees in response to the flood.

Rachel Lopez, a civil engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' St. Louis District office, said the biggest issue with the levees is that they've been around for so long.

"As is the case with any infrastructure, they have to be maintained and budgets are stretched thin," she said.

Lopez cautioned the commissioners about sand pipes in flood relief wells.

"These relief wells are past their design expectancy," she said. "They need to be flushed out and if they're not operating at peak efficiency, they need to be replaced."

The discussion moved back toward finding a way to pay for upgrades to the system. Lopez noted that the Corps could provide technical help, as well as historical information on the levees, but not any financial commitment.

"We don't have the authority, or the funding, to go out and do a whole new redesign of the levees," Lopez said.

Randolph County Board of Commissioners Chairman Dr. Marc Kiehna said that someplace there needs to be a way to repair and maintain the system the counties have.

"Can't we take a look at this and do something different we can afford?" he asked.

Suggestions included mapping the sand boil locations with Geographic Information System (GIS) software and recording the elevation of the levees with GPS.

Jim Hill, retired operations manager on the Kaskaskia River Project and a nationally-recognized master planning expert within the Corps of Engineers, said his biggest concern was underseepage.

Underseepage is water that seeps through a levee's foundation, creating voids that allow more water to flow through.

"The river is flooding more often than it ever has for a variety of reasons," he said. "You can continue to put band-aids on it and periodic upgrades, but these levees are getting older."

Later Thursday, Gov. Bruce Rauner announced in a news release that FEMA will assist with damage assessments in the 25 counties declared state disaster areas.

On Friday, Larry Willis, Randolph County Emergency Management Agency public information officer, informed media outlets that FEMA officials were expected to be in Randolph County only on Wednesday.

"We want to do everything possible to help people and communities affected by this devastating flooding and the severe storms that preceded it," Rauner said in the release. "These damage assessments will provide us with greater detail as to the impact of these storms and could be used to support a request for federal assistance if the results indicate we meet federal requirements."

Randolph County has already matched the threshold of $119,073 to be considered for state assistance, with Randolph County EMA Coordinator Mike Hoelscher stating during the meeting that damage costs were around $1 million.

The state needs to meet a threshold of $18.1 million to qualify for federal assistance. Matt Rice, district director at U.S. congressman Mike Bost's office, said during Thursday's meeting that Bost is waiting on the outcome of FEMA's assessments.

"We're kind of in wait-and-see mode," he said.

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