Thursday, June 6, 2013

When the levee breaks

I live near the Mississippi River in Illinois.  Pretty close to St. Louis.  If anyone's been paying attention to the news lately, you may have noticed that we've gotten just a bit of rain.  Enough to breach a levee in a small town across the river from me earlier this week.

This is the local bridge, the New Clark Bridge.  It will always be called that.  Even though it's twenty years old now.  It was finished during the Flood of '93
The local landmark.  Those silos have two distinguishing marks on them now, there's a black base marking where the water level was in 1973, and roughly 13 feet higher, a red line telling people where the water crested in '93.

At the moment, we're under the '73 flood level, but just barely.

People here just shrug, grabs shovels, sandbags, and water pumps.  The river is home to many.  I live far enough away that I'm not effected directly, but some of my family lives on the flood plains.  One house you can see from the highway next to the levee.  

Yes, that last picture is of closed flood gates with water seeping under them.  I have a feeling that if I go back, there'd be sandbags there.

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