Flood Control Project Needs Fine-Tuning Runoff From Brief Rainfall Floods Kellogg Back Yard

Donna Lloyd says despite a massive local flood control effort, all it took was a brief deluge last week to flood her Kellogg yard.

Lloyd was on her way out to a birthday party Friday night when she saw the stream flowing down Fourth Street.

Past the storm drain.

Into the gravel of the Lloyds’ back yard.

The nearly $15.7 million Milo Creek Permanent Improvement Project was supposed to bring an end to massive flooding - laced with mine waste - that hit Kellogg and Wardner in 1997. The project is wrapping up this fall.

“They spent millions of dollars to stop this … then we end up getting it all over again,” Lloyd said. “And that’s a mild rain. What’s it going to do when it really comes down?”

It’s not that simple, officials say.

A combination of a paving job last week and a possibly misplaced storm drain may have caused the problem.

“That really isn’t a creek issue,” said Glenn Jackson, Milo Creek project coordinator, who worked as a consultant for the Idaho Bureau of Disaster Services. “The creek handled everything and all the rains.”

The flood control project encased Milo Creek in a series of pipes and underground channels. Lloyd’s house sits about three blocks west of the creek’s path below Main Street.

Project crews have found that if a downpour puts a lot of water in local streets and storm drains are not properly maintained, some flooding occurs. Crews did build two berms in Wardner to divert water into storm drains, Jackson said.

Work on the flood control project did include a storm drain behind Donna Lloyd’s house, Jackson said. But the drain wasn’t really part of Milo Creek activities, he said: workers only replaced an old, overtaxed drain in the same location on Fourth Street “for the benefit of the city.”

Meanwhile, the city of Kellogg last week paved the street, said Jamie Sharp, the city’s superintendent of public works. The street was not paved before, so water percolated into the ground. The new layer of asphalt funnels rainwater down the street instead.

But the new drain was also not installed exactly where it was before, Sharp said.

“It sure would be nice it was back by two feet,” he said.

To make sure future runoff heads into the drain, city crews built a three-inch diagonal berm on Fourth Street at first light Monday. Sharp himself brought sand bags over to the Lloyd house Friday night.

Donna Lloyd got his attention with some choice language.

“She was pretty blunt,” the public works superintendent said. “She always is.”