Published: July 01, 2008 10:43 pm         

Conservancy District officials say levees damaged but unbroken

Emergency repair work was necessary on levee near Sullivan Place

TERRE HAUTE — Heavy rains damaged but didn’t break levees under the care of the Honey Creek-Vigo Conservancy District during recent flooding, conservancy officials said Tuesday.

Conservancy officials, like many people, had heard rumors of levees being cut or failing, but “to our knowledge, there was no place that the levee” was broken during the flooding, said Rick Jenkins, chairman of the conservancy district, which met Tuesday afternoon in the U.S. Department of Agriculture offices west of Honey Creek Mall.

The only place where a levee was below its normal level was on Thompson Ditch near South Seventh Street where work was being done on the levee, officials said. Because the levee was lower there, flood water was actually able to drain into the ditch from a neighboring area, Jenkins said.

That levee work “reduced the effectiveness of the levee, thank goodness,” Jenkins said. If the levee had not been lower in that area – allowing water to pour into Thompson Ditch – “we would have had eight foot of water rather than four” in the neighborhood nearby, he said.

Although levees never collapsed, flood water did flow over the top of levees in different places, officials said. Emergency repair work also was necessary to keep the Honey Creek levee near Sullivan Place and Rigney Drive from failing, Jenkins said.

Denise Held, a project engineer with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, inspected levees on the morning of the floods on June 7, she said.

“I pulled into Allendale and saw everything underwater … people in boats,” Held said. The levee was over-topping at Rigney Road and in other places in southern Vigo County. “There’s a lot of damage out there,” she said.

Jimm Nidlinger, an Allendale resident at the meeting, said he saw trees collapsed into Honey Creek creating a dam effect that he thinks may have contributed to flooding in Allendale.

“It looks like those trees got knocked down during the storm and formed a dam about five feet higher than our levee. … It looks like a beaver dam,” Nidlinger said. “It would appear that had those trees not been there, our levee probably would have been OK,” he said.

Other Vigo County residents questioned the timing of the rising water, which Jenkins said could be explained by water arriving from upstream.

“The levees that we built are not for our water that fell on us,” Jenkins said. “It’s for water that came from the east.”

Members of the Conservancy District board voted without dissent to approve emergency spending for repairs on the levee near Rigney Road and Sullivan Place. The repairs totaled around $40,000 and were done by S & G Excavating.

Excavators with S & G worked in the dark during a lightning storm to secure the levee near Sullivan Place, Jenkins said. “Had we not done it … it would have really breached out,” he said.

The conservancy district has received federal funding for some emergency work, officials said. They will work to get more federal funding for additional repair work made necessary by the flood, they said.

The Honey Creek-Vigo Conservancy District was formed in 1990 for flood prevention and control. Levees maintained by the district were designed for a 100-year flood event, however, the recent flooding likely exceeded the 100-year level, officials said.

Satellite images passed around at the meeting indicated parts of southeastern Vigo County received more than 12 inches of rain in the 24 hours from 1 p.m. June 6 to 1 p.m. June 7. The southern half of the county received between eight and 12 inches of rain during that same time.

In addition to the rain on June 6-7, much of Vigo County received more than 16 inches of rain between May 31 and June 7, the satellite images showed.

Arthur Foulkes can be reached at (812) 231-4232 or arthur.foulkes@tribstar.com.