Frustrated Valley residents call for better flood protection at packed town hall
Nearly four months after a cyclonic storm unleashed widespread flooding and the costliest disaster in Nebraska history, feelings remain raw and the path to recovery remains long.
By News Channel NebraskaNearly four months after a cyclonic storm unleashed widespread flooding and the costliest disaster in Nebraska history, feelings remain raw and the path to recovery remains long.
That was clear Monday night at a packed town hall meeting in Valley.
When the Union Dike broke in mid-March, it sent floodwaters from the Platte River spilling through the Douglas County townof 2,200. The residents who hadn’t already left scrambled to evacuate while others hunkered down as Valley became a watery island.
On Monday, residents who filled the small City Council meeting room and spilled out into the hallway made it clear to local and federal officials that they’d like see several changes, including:
- A taller, more robust levee.
- Better emergency communications and coherent messages on evacuations.
- Douglas County drainage guidelines that bring an end to property owners making changes that worsen flooding for their neighbors.
- Quicker action to blow open ice-choked rivers to lessen the chances of corrosive ice jam flooding.
“The Union Dike flooding was avoidable,” Douglas County resident Al Mumm told representatives of the county, the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resources District and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “That was obvious because it failed. If you have to make it twice as high and ten times as thick, that’s what you should do.”
John Winkler, general manager of the NRD, an agency focused on water management, pushed back, saying that the scale of the flooding and the corrosive power of ice slabs would have shoved through any levee. And while bigger and better would be ideal, it may not be possible. The entire levee along the Platte would need to be upgraded, not just outside of Valley, and that means getting multiple jurisdictions to agree to the costly improvements.
“A levee is only as good as its weakest link,” he said.
How much would it cost to raise and widen the full length of the levee? No one knows. But building a dike to protect nearby Fremont, which also became an island in March, would cost about $100 million, which is cost-prohibitive, Winkler said.
Winkler said the NRD is updating its hazard mitigation plan, a sort of manual on natural disasters. The lessons learned from this flood will be incorporated into the update, he said.
A number of residents said local officials need to do a better job of coordinating during crisis. The mayor of Valley called for an evacuation that Douglas County officials subsequently said wasn’t in effect, leaving people confused and uncertain.
“We do things for tornadoes, we have sirens all over the county, let’s think positive and see what can be worked out so that we know when we need to evacuate,” Mason Steinberg told the officials.
County Board member Mary Ann Borgeson, who convened the town hall meeting, said better emergency communications will be developed.
Jody Bidlack raised the issue of neighbors making changes that leave others more vulnerable to flooding. County residents were allowed to have ditches filled in; new homes were built on elevated ground, which increased flooding downstream; and some driveways don’t include culverts to speed drainage. The net result is that water rushes overland onto other people’s property.
And the county is part of the problem, Bidlack said, because county workers will fill in ditches if residents ask them to.
“There are ditches to nowhere, and there aren’t culverts to allow water to go where it should,” she said. “Why does no one stop and think, ‘This is a stupid idea?’ ”
Borgeson promised that the county would follow up.
Emergency repairs have plugged the hole in the Union Dike, but final rehabilitation and armoring of the entire levee is many months away.
Bret Budd, chief of the Corps of Engineers’ Omaha restoration team, told residents that the engineering and design work on repairs may take most of the rest of the year, with construction possibly starting by the end of December. From there, the pace of work will depend upon winter weather.
Hundreds of miles of levees were damaged in the flooding and corps officials have made it clear that it will take a couple of years to get levees back to pre-flood conditions.
In chronicling the sheer volume of water in the Platte and Missouri River systems, Budd described the flood as biblical in scale.
“There was no stopping this,” he said. “The levees weren’t built for this kind of flow.”