ST. LOUIS (KMOX) – The Army Corps of Engineers is warning we’re “one storm event away” from potential trouble on some area levees.
“The ground’s all saturated and it’s going to go into the rivers and cause the rivers to go up,” says Matt Hunn, Army Corps Chief of Emergency Management in St. Louis. “So, everybody needs to pay attention. It’s just one storm event from potential flood.”
Matt Hunn, Army Corps Chief of Emergency Management in St. Louis (Kevin Killeen/KMOX)
Near the end of the wettest June on record in St. Louis, Hunn is monitoring river levels with a wary eye on some of the lesser levees that protect farms and towns, from St. Charles to Clarksville.
Sandbagging is already underway in Clarksville to shore up the shops and homes along the waterfront. Hunn says his teams are also monitoring agricultural levees protecting homes along the Mississippi near Winnfield, where creek water breached levees in recent days and swamped some farmland.
Related story: New Rain Record, 3 Tornadoes from Storms Sunday Evening
To the south, Hunn reports sandbagging is also taking place in Herculaneum. And he says the water is getting high on one of the three levees protecting Ste. Genevieve.
“If we get another batch of rain and suddenly our crests get pumped up another four or five feet, then it will change our approach,” Hunn says. “More people will have to be out sandbagging.”
Meanwhile, Hunn says the levees and floodwall protecting St. Louis and East St. Louis have some minor problems with pump stations, but nothing that threatens to flood either side of the river.
Hunn says there are no plans to dynamite any levees or intentionally breach any rural levees to relieve pressure elsewhere along the system.
And, he says in general, the levee system is stronger than it was during the great flood of 1993.
“The 1993 levees, their condition before and after the flood, I worked on all of them,” Hunn says. “They were garbage. They were really in bad shape, and since ’93 we’ve done a lot of things, and they’re a lot better today than they were back then.”
(TM and Copyright 2015 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2015 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
Follow us on Twitter | Like us on Facebook
