Fight Against The Tide Cataldo Residents Explore Options For Coping With - And Preventing - Floods
Two floods in 10 months have mobilized residents of this tiny settlement along the Coeur d’Alene River.
To get ready for the next emergency, they’re polling their neighbors on medical needs, identifying helicopter landing sites and setting up phone trees to spread any word of danger.
They’re also looking for ways to keep from getting soggy or stranded during high runoff as they did in the Dec. 1 flood.
Solutions discussed here at a Saturday morning meeting will be expensive.
“When you look at building dikes and at some of the temporary things we want to do, we need to find some money from somewhere,” said Bill Schwartz, Kootenai County disaster services coordinator.
Schwartz spoke Saturday at a gathering of the Cataldo Flood Committee. His interest is personal as well as professional. He lives up the LaTour Creek Road that starts at I-90 and heads south from Cataldo. The route to his home was cut off during flooding.
Families living away from the river were cut off from medical care, work and school during the flood two weeks ago.
About 50 homes are in the Cataldo area. But many more are affected by the high water, said Cataldo resident Verne Blalack.
Blalack is a retiree who grew up in the Silver Valley. He bought a home in Cataldo a year after the 1974 flood, the worst in recent history. He remembers canoeing down the raging river in ‘74, chasing someone’s runaway freezer.
Since then, flood control has become part of his life. He cuts trees on the riverside dike to help maintain it. With other residents, he keeps an eye on the floodgates that were put on the culverts under Interstate 90.
The interstate both aids and complicates flood control at Cataldo. I-90 was built in 1963, as was the dike designed to protect it from the river.
If the dike broke, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would fix it. But the corps isn’t responsible for leaks. And the dike is leaking in two places.
The cheapest solution would be to spend about $7,000 on gravel to fill the leaks, insisted Blalack.
“The best solution is to put a second dike behind the first one,” he said.
Corps engineers have scouted the best location for a back-up dike. But it would be overwhelmed, they warned, if the water rose any higher than it did this year.
The river flow reached 35,000 cubic feet per second at Cataldo on Dec. 1, which is expected to happen about once every 10 years. In 1974, when 1,000 people were evacuated, the river flow reached 67,000 cfs.
An even bigger problem than the leaking dikes, Blalack believes, is the flooding of Latour Creek Road.
“There’s about 100 households up there. When the flood comes, those people can’t get in and out,” Blalack said.
One solution would be to raise the roadbed five feet for about a mile. By one estimate, that would cost $150,000. The road would then become a dike, and further protect Cataldo. It would also push more water toward Old Mission State Park, just downstream.
There’s also talk of raising the abandoned Union Pacific railroad tracks. That would serve as a dike, and eliminate the need for raising Latour Creek Road.
The work might be done when the tracks are turned into a rails-to-trails park, which Union Pacific is discussing with the state Parks and Recreation Department.
The flood committee is gathering information on lost wages and other factors from flooding that might persuade politicians to address their problem. They plan to meet next with officials from Kootenai and Shoshone counties, the state highway department and the Corps of Engineers.
Schwartz, the disaster services coordinator, hopes the interest in flooding doesn’t drop with the river level.
“In July, you don’t have high water and nobody really cares,” he said. “The community has to carry the issue.”
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