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Show Experienced roadman suggests ways to prevent disaster repeat As one who had the exper-mce exper-mce of being charged with le responsibility of overseeing ie attempted control of the ood of 1952, may I give a ord of warning to the towns-sople. towns-sople. Reports of the snow pack on ie Hobble Creek drainage in-icate in-icate the possibility of very gh water through town this 5 ring. Should we get abnormally warm weather, or a few days of warm spring rain, flooding could be much worse than in 1952. For those who didn't know or have forgotten, let me relate a few incidents that happened I remember of pulling large pine trees from the city park, dragging them across Main Street, placing them in the creek suspended by cables to stop the creek bank from washing away back of our fire station. I remember one night about midnight of seeing a boy about halfway across the footbridge on First East, when the bank caved from one end, dropping it into the creek, the boy ran back to the other side just as that bank caved and dropped the bridge into the creek. The boy made it, but the bridge was never seen again. I remember getting ready to blast the road bridge on 2nd So. because it was too small; the volume and velocity of the stream saved us that problem. The bridge broke up and washed wash-ed away (a concrete bridge). The pieces are buried somewhere some-where in the west fields along with hundreds of thousands of yards of silt, gravel, trees, stumps, etc. I remember of seeing acres of orchards being undermined on a turn in the creek, and being be-ing washed away; of seeing buildings washed away, and others being buried under many feet of silt, causing heavy damage. Believe this or not, an automobile auto-mobile even tipped over in a wash on 4th East and 1st So. The wash was created by about a foot of water the width of the street, flowing north to the State Fish Hatchery, Hatch-ery, where the muddy waters killed thousand of fish. I could relate many happenings happen-ings that we experienced from the mouth of the canyon to the lake, i May I make a few suggestions sugges-tions to the people who have property abutting the creek, to the authorities, or anyone iinterested. LET US PREPARE NOW, while there is still time to take care of a problem which may or may not arise. (1). Let us clean the channel chan-nel to its capacity I remember of trying to clean it in 1952 and of trying to get easements signed to cross people's property with a dike to try and control the water; wa-ter; of being threatened in many ways and of finally getting get-ting the easement signed about the time the water was entering enter-ing the basement of the property prop-erty owners' homes. If memory serves me correctly, cor-rectly, the city and the county coun-ty made an agreement with the army engineers to maintain main-tain the channel after it was cleaned and repaired by the engineers after the flood. I believe be-lieve this agreement is still in effect. had his boots off for six weeks, may I urge everyone to prepare pre-pare now. We may have a very moderate spring and not need all this preparation, but I for one would prefer to be ready. Sincerely J. Milton Giles (2) Organize beforehand In '52, we had never seen a flood in our creek. We were not organized soon enough and in the excitement we never did get organized as well as we should have. Had we been ready, the damage (engineers estimate at $285,000) could have been less and the expense held to a minimum. min-imum. May I give a few examples of what happened in '52? Someone would advertise on radio that we were in a state of emergency and needed volunteers vol-unteers and equipment. Sometimes Some-times we couldn't get enough help, other times we were swamped with help. Late one afternoon, 100 boys from the BTU arrived with a promise from someone that they were needed to drive trucks. When told that we only had 35 aolbb gv ca .... o f-,w trucks going, and that they all had their own drivers, some of these boys were very unhappy with us. (3) Organize our merchants merch-ants or anyone who might supply sup-ply materials needed. Have them insist on a purchase order or-der for anything called for. In the confusion of '52, we had many people take advantage advan-tage of the situation by running run-ning to our merchants for hip boots, shovels, axes, cable, and many things to be used in controlling the flood. We had cases of people using their equipment with the idea that they were getting a regular rental rate. We even had about $1500.00 worth of blasting supplies sup-plies charged to the city from the Illinois Powder Company, who truly thought they were doing something to help in an emergency. These bills were all signed, of course, but how much of these supplies were used on the creek is anybody's guess. I am not relating these facts to be critical of anyone because be-cause I was just as responsible as anyone. The consequence of this flood and the many little things I have mentioned,- was that after the high water was over and the city officials asked ask-ed for bills to be presented, they received over $50,000 worth of bills, the first night they met. There was very little lit-tle money to pay them with, and I think if it hadn't been for the generosity of our local contractors and hundreds of townspeople who donated their time, that this city could still be paying for the 1952 flood I understand that most of the large bills were satisfied by paying about ten cents on the dollar. Speaking as one who hardly |