Elwood is bustling with activity the past week. More than a dozen dump trucks can be seen
hustling through town all day long as area contractors are frantically working to fortify the levee
along the Missouri River. Aller’s LLC of Hiawatha is one of the companies that has been
contracted for work that started last Friday and is expected to last well into next week.
“I have been hauling about 12 hours a day since last Friday,” said Jim Aller, trucking supervisor
for the company owned by his son, PJ Aller. “All together, we’re doing about 300 loads a day.”
Contractors from several communities in Northeast Kansas — including Soden Construction
of Hiawatha — are working long days, making a five-mile round trip 21 times a day.
“I usually get in about 1 3/4 loads an hour,” Aller said Tuesday night during one of the round
trips in Aller’s big yellow truck. Aller’s has two trucks working at Elwood — the other is driven
by either Lynn “German” Schoenning or Mark Kleopper.
An excavating crew is packing the trucks with sand dug up from a farm just west of town.
The trucks make the trek back to the east edge of town and drive on a bumpy and rocky makeshift
road through fields and open water to an area along the levee where sand boils have perculated.
Tons of rock has been placed across much of the area near the Elwood-Gladden levee to create
the road. Alongside the road, trucks are dumping tons of sand and other crews are spreading it
alongside the bottom of the levee and packing it tight to help fill any more boils.
“Water is leaching under that levee and creating sand boils,” Aller said. “The pressure of the sand,
ideally, is to keep that levee from busting.” Two levees broke earlier this week upriver,
near Hamburg, Iowa and in Atchison County, Mo. According to the Army Corp of Engineers,
the bursting of the levees will allow pressure on those levees to ease a little. “But only for a
short while, they told us,” Aller said, then gestured around at the town as he drove through.
“Since those levees broke upriver I’ve really been seeing people packing up today. It scared them.”
At the same time the contractors were working to pack sand along the levee to help protect this
town of around 11,500 people, many of those concerned townspeople were at the school’s new
gymnasium Tuesday evening for a town hall meeting, led by City Attorney Joel Euler.
Since the area was alerted to the flood watch, Elwood has held several town hall meetings,
including one Monday where Gov. Sam Brownback spoke to the residents and tried to alleviate
fears. Many worry that flooding is going to be worse than in 1993, when a levee broke and the
waters of the Mighty Mo submerged Elwood and flowed five miles west into the town of Wathena.
Gavin’s Point Dam, at the border of South Dakota and Nebraska, has been releasing 100,000 cubic
square feet a second to release pressure from monster amounts of melted snow and rainwater
up north. This week that figure is expected to jump to 150,000 csf a second and continue through
the rest of the summer.
Euler told residents the peak could reach 32 feet by the end of August, well over mandatory
evacuation flood stage of 29 feet. But, he wanted the townspeople to be aware of the situation
and take caution, not panic and succomb to rumors. One resident asked when the flood watch
would be called off. “December,” was his serious answer to her. Not only is Gavin’s Point
releasing a monstrous amount of water, five other dams are also allowing releases to relieve
pressure in the north, although Euler said many of those releases are not as big as Gavin’s Point.
Euler told the townpeople the levees are on a 12-hour watch and when the river reaches 25 feet,
then a 24-hour watch will be implemented. Until then, it’s watch, wait and prepare. As one council
member pointed out, almost 200,000 sand bags have been filled in preparation of what could be
the worst flood in about 60 years. “But it might not,” Euler pointed out. “They (Army Corp of
Engineers) are telling us the worst-case scenario.”
By Joey May
Hiawatha World
