A TON OF WATER

“There was a ton of water this summer.”

It’s just an expression… But what does it really mean in our neighborhood and beyond?

If my calculations are correct, it was closer to 35 billion tons of water. The flooding in our town was incredible. While the water recedes and people try to get back to some sort of normalcy, I find myself pondering a summer we won’t forget.

In June, I asked some people in Omaha if they saw the golf balls lost at our golf course go floating by. I should have asked if they had seen a ton of iron and steel go by. Yes, one of the control gates at the Oahe Reservoir jammed. And when they inspected it to determine why, they discovered that a one ton piece had broken off and was nowhere to be found.

Since iron doesn’t float, the water must have pushed it so far downstream that they couldn’t find it. (BTW, I know iron doesn’t float because there is a poster that says so in the Kitchen Store downtown: CAST IRON SINKS.) Now I better appreciate the force of a Tsunami.

The water also shreaded the causeway in Steamboat Park. Unfortunately, I do not have before and after pictures taken from the exact same spot. But you can get the idea looking at these pictures -- the pavement and boat parking and wooden posts and rock shoreline are now gone. Furthermore, the city has lost access to half of the wells that provide sanitary water to the town!

And even though the river is back in its banks, flooding is still occuring. The problem is that the ground is still so saturated that when it rains it has nowhere to go. So water still pools in open fields and seeps into people's basements after what used to be a welcome morning rain.

The bottom line is that things will not be back to normal anytime soon. It will be a tough winter with so many roads destroyed and insufficient time to repair them. And frankly, things will never be the same. The series of dams along the Missourri River that were capable of controlling flooding, simply were not operated in a manner to do so.