Rensselaer Adventures

This blog reports events and interesting tidbits from Rensselaer, Indiana and the surrounding area.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Three floods

Poking around on the USGS site for river flow, you can find all sorts of information and data. Here are graphs of three major floods on the Iroquois, the June 1958 flood, the July 2003 flood, and the ongoing June 2015 flood. In both 1958 and 2003 the river was at a very low level when rains hit. Both shot up to a peak and then receded with a bump or two along the way. In the case of 2003 the second bump was sizable.

 In contrast, the river was not at unusually low levels this year when the big rains came, and the peak (so far) did not occur early in the flooding. Rather the peak was delayed.
 The time scales and the discharge are not equal--June 2015 has only 24 days on it, not yet the full month.

We will set another daily record today. The old record was from 1981 when the river was flowing at the rate of 770 cubic feet per second. It currently is flowing at 2260 cubic feet per second. It seems to have peaked from the last rain, but we may get heavy rain tonight. (I am hoping that it will miss us and go further south.)

In other happenings, there are about 250 football players in camps at SJC. I saw vans from four school districts. There were two practices going on in these fields and another one or perhaps two on the field south of the soccer fields. At least they are getting some cooler weather.
 Paving is about to begin on the new road in Drexel Industrial Park. The excavators have been replaced with equipment from Town and Country Paving.  I do not know if there will be curbs.
There is still work going on inside the Royal Oak Restaurant. They have constructed a new entrance directly onto Drexel Drive. A few days ago I asked a worker I saw outside of the restaurant when it would open and he said they were hoping for an opening in about two weeks.

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