Despite Rain, Rivers Inside Banks Impact Of Wednesday’s Showers Expected To Swell Rivers Late Today

So far, so good.

That’s what disaster officials in North Idaho were saying Wednesday.

Despite a day of rain, the rivers were staying inside their banks, levees were holding and no one reported flooded homes.

The Coeur d’Alene and St. Joe rivers were dropping, and the Spokane River was rising at a slower pace. But Wednesday’s rain was expected to swell the rivers late today.

Gerald Brown of St. Maries used Wednesday’s lull to perfect his “sandbaggers,” metal contraptions that make filling sandbags fast and easy.

“They work real good,” Brown said. His dike district has filled more than 3,000 sandbags in case the river tops the dike along Shepherds Road.

“This rain’s going to raise heck if it don’t quit,” Brown said. Drier - but warmer - weather was predicted for the weekend, however.

Benewah County’s civil defense director, George Currier, spent Wednesday meeting with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and county workers to discuss flood-fighting plans.

The corps also started backfilling a slow leak on the Meadowhurst dike, which doubles as state Highway 3. The breach was scheduled to be fixed this spring, but work was delayed because of the controversy over the felling of cottonwoods along the dike.

The cottonwoods provided a perch for bald eagles, an endangered species. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stopped work after it discovered eagle habitat was being destroyed while fixing the levees.

“If we had been able to get our levee reconstruction started, this is the area we would have done first,” Currier said.

The St. Joe River was just above flood stage Wednesday, at 2,132.6 feet in elevation. That means the river can rise about another 3-1/2 feet before it starts causing serious problems.

“We expect it to rise maybe another foot this weekend as a result of the warm weather,” Currier said. “It may be a ho-hum situation.”

In Cataldo, the Coeur d’Alene River was just under 2,141 feet - 2 feet below flood stage. Although it crested above flood stage Monday, the overflowing river never blocked access up Latour Creek Road, where about 90 families live.

Lake Coeur d’Alene was up to 2,130.5, which is 2-1/2 feet above summer level. Last year, Harbor Island on the Spokane River flooded when the lake reached 2,133 feet.

Washington Water Power engineer Steve Silkworth said it could get that high again.

“It’s up to Mother Nature,” he said. “It all depends on how the snow melts. There’s still a lot of snow in the mountains. Basically, anything above 4,500 feet has hardly melted.”

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: FLOOD TRAINING The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is holding a sandbag and levee building demonstration today at 5:30 p.m. at the Kootenai County Fairgrounds.