At the airport (updated)

The Jasper County Airport Authority held its monthly meeting on Wednesday night. On the way there I took a couple pictures of water in the fields. Below we are looking to the fairgrounds and the water is highlighted by the low sun. I suspect that there is a lot of water in fields like this that is hard to see from the road. The corn is yellow and discolored, not the bright green that corn should be.

 This was in the same area but looking toward town. Where the water has been too long the corn is dead. Outside the dead zone there is a ring of yellow, stunted corn, and beyond that corn that looks healthy.

When I got to the airport, I saw the new snow plow that the airport purchased from the Purdue airport. It is big.

 I also took a picture of the current fuel farm, something that the Airport Authority wants to replace.

 The meeting was relatively short. The NGC engineer was not present, but he had two recommendations. The first was to give the president of the Authority the right to sign an acceptance of the FAA grant that they have submitted if the grant is approved. The FAA often gives notification of grant approval but then wants acceptance in twenty four or forty eight hours, and it can be hard to get a quorum of the committee together on such short notice. The other recommendation was to give the president the authority to sign the contracts for the fuel tanks and related things after the grant is accepted. Both recommendations were approved.

The airport manager had a number of items to report. He recommended they wait a bit before deciding the best way to proceed with some hangar repairs, and also that they wait before they decide how to proceed with a silent alarm.  The members approved a motion that has to go to the County Council moving funds from one line to another so that they can pay their share of the cost of the new fuel farm. There were other miscellaneous items.

The budget committee had mostly finished preparing next year's budget but members of that committee had disagreed on whether there should be a line item for hangar development in the cumulative building fund. After some discussion, the members approved the line item with one negative vote.

The Airport will host the annual fly in on July 11. The pork chop dinner costs $6 but everything else is free. If the weather cooperates, there should be many planes to view, and if the weather is not so good, there will be only a few planes to view.

And now for the river report. The river has sunk below eleven feet at Laird's Landing, which is a foot below flood stage. The river will not set a flow record for July 2 because the 1993 level was 1070 cubic feet per second and the river had a morning reading of 989 and was falling,. It should be below ten feet before the end of the day. However, it did set the record for July 1. The old record was 1050 cfs in 1993 and late in the evening the reading for this year was 1100. It had been 1240 in the morning. Below is a chart showing the entire June 2015 flood, starting May 31 and ending today. The river was above flood stage (12 feet) for about three weeks.

On the weather report last night on WFLI there was a map of June precipitation.  It showed a band mostly south of Rensselaer that received 15 inches. I think the weatherman also said there were areas that got 20 inches.

All the roads in the cemetery are now passable, though some have a lot of dirt and mud on them where the water sat for days.

Update: An article that went out via the AP noted that the state climatologist said that June was the wettest June on record for all of Indiana and the fourth wettest month since records have been kept. It singled out Rensselaer because a rainfall monitoring station here recorded 18.06 inches during the month.