Road closures are forcing us to alter delivery this issue

HARRISBURG—We’re receiving reports that conditions with the encroaching water are getting worse in tha ‘burg.

Most of our delivery routes for South Counties as it stands right now are underwater at some point.

Here’s the DOT report:

http://www.dot.state.il.us/road/closures.txt

We’ve talked to Harrisburg mayor Eric Gregg this evening, who is saying that they’re keeping up with it, but the water is still rising in and around the city. While we’ve not talked to people down in Hardin, we’re hearing it’s pretty rough there. And we just got an email from Gallatin that there are a LOT of roads with impassible spots where we HAVE to go to do deliveries.

So. What we’re doing tonight is hanging tight and reassessing. It looks like we may go ahead and take North Counties (both northeast and northwest, although St. Francisville Road is closed right now) Tuesday, and wait to see if water levels go down by Wednesday in South Counties after the levees are blown tonight in New Madrid/Bird’s Point.

We do, however, have a staff member in Cairo traveling down to Missouri to see what can be seen of the Corps’ blowing those levees. He has night vision camera equipment and everything needed to record whatever may happen in that area for this event. If we get anything good, we will of course post it here.

We understand that the levees could be blown at any time. The Corps of Engineers, we’re told, built these levees after the 1937 flood, and within them are pipes. If the levees need blown, the Corps drills down the levee into the pipes placed there, and stuffs them with explosives. Back in the 30s the explosives of choice were sticks of dynamite. Today, they’re using liquid compounds that, when combined, mix to make a ferocious explosion along the lines of C4. It’s our understanding that two miles of the levee structure in the New Madrid/Birds Point floodway are going to be blown, so that there won’t be so much tearing away at the sides of the levee that’s left after the crevassing.

This, we understand, was what happened in the 1937 flood. The people upstream were grateful to the farmers downstream who did such a thing. Today, I’m not sure the whole thing is so amicable. Every farmer in Missouri who will be affected by the levee breach is on subsidies. Since it’s come to be commonly known what farm subsidies are (corporate welfare), people don’t have such a high opinion of farmers, especially whiny farmers. They’re all saying their land won’t be usable after the levee breach. That’s utter bullshit. Their land will be fine, and it’s not exactly “theirs” anyway….when they farm in that particular floodplain, even if they’ve purchase land, they purchase it with an eminent domain agreement that in a flood event, if the levees need breached, the farmers are SOL. They can whine all they want that it’s not in their deed. But it is. This is what big government gets us—government control over what happens to us during natural disasters, eminent domain, farm subsidies, and whiny farmers who think we don’t know that they most exercise they get is walking out to the mailbox to get their subsidy check.

Anyway, enough griping about subsidies. We want to know if your water levels fall after the levees are breached. We’ve been told the Birds Point levee has been blown. A second one should be blown at 1 a.m., and a third in the New Madrid area blown at about 5 a.m. We’ll keep you posted; you do the same.

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Posted by Jack Howser on May 2 2011. Filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry