The reign of water

The river is at or very near record levels. It started setting daily records on Tuesday, but today it is not just setting records for the day but may be setting records since measurement began. If there is no more rain, it looks like the river will crest at about 16.5 feet. The river has been above flood stage (12 feet) for ten days. How much longer will it be before it slips below the 12 level?

 This may look like some people playing in the river, but it is two USGS employees measuring the river flow. They are the people who created the red stars in the graph above.

 The water is almost to the floor of Ayda's. The restaurant is closed today.

 On the other side of the water people were sandbagging the two houses closest to the river. This morning the Sheriff announced that free sandbags were available at the county highway garage on SR 114. He also announced that US 231 was closed north of Rensselaer.

 Backyards next to the river were flooded. Ordinary slides were turned into water slides.

 LaRue Pool had a lake today. The good news is that the water is no longer flowing over the road. The bad news is that the water is still over the road because the river has risen so high that it has backed up the creek. This is the level of the river.

Do you know what the little white or yellow thing is near the center of the picture?

It is the top of the fire hydrant on the corner of Lincoln and Elza.

Below is a truck delivering sandbags for the people living in the house just north of the College Street Bridge. While I was watching this, a school bus pulled up and stopped at the intersection of Lincoln and College. The driver look befuddled, so I pulled up next to the bus. He wanted to get to SJC. I explained to him how he could take Front Street to the highway and bypass the closed road. I suspect a lot of people are being surprised by closed roads.

Below is a picture of Potawatomie Park from the bowstring arch bridge.

 There are still a few inches of clearance under the Washington Street Bridge.

 You may think that you are not affected by the sandbagging. You may be wrong. City workers placed sandbags around the electrical box for the water treatment plant in Iroquois Park. If the plant lost electricity, we could still get water as long as there was water in the water tanks. After that, I am not sure.

 The park department headquarters building in Iroquois Park is isolated--to reach it requires driving on a road that is several inches--maybe a foot--under water.

The gas department was busy today shutting off gas to houses that were flooding.

Below is the water going under the Melville Street Bridge. I wanted to get a picture showing how much clearance there was, but there was too much water to get the picture I wanted.

I was able to find a vantage point that let me peer under the Grace Street Bridge.

Busy Bee is prepared for more water.

The river seems to be as high as it was in the 2003 flood, but the situation in Rensselaer is not as bad. My guess is that in 2003 Rensselaer got a lot more rain. This year the rain was heaviest to our north and east and the rise in the river is reflecting that heavy rain upstream.

What is really scary about our situation is that we may get several more inches of rain in the next few days. This morning Rensselaer got about a quarter or a third of an inch of rain. That little bit caused seepage in my basement, showing that the ground is saturated. I do not even want to think what a big downpour would do. I just hope I do not get the opportunity to write a post about it. I would much rather write about the receding water.

Enough rain

We keep getting a bit more rain every day. The downtown weather station says we got more than an inch today, and there may be more on the way later tonight. The latest downpour put water over the road in Brookside Park and also on Bunkum. There is still a big line of rain that should pass though our area in a few hours.

The river would be down below ten feet at the measuring station if we had not gotten all the rain we have had in week. You can see the effect of the 12th and again on the 13th, and today's rain may send it back over 14 feet. We have not been setting records for the day because the huge flood in 1958 occurred on these days, but tomorrow we may beat it.

I saw on Facebook a report that kids were jumping into the river from the bowstring bridge.  That is not a smart thing to do, but kids will be kids,

I think today's rain dooms the river float that was scheduled for Saturday.

The weather forecast says we may get more rain each day for the rest of the week. Do you think we will see the river beat its peak on the 9th and 10th?

Nightshade, the river, and zoning

A few years ago I noticed vine with purple flowers was creeping up one of my trees. I thought nothing of it, and did not bother it. A year or two later I noticed that there was more of it. Last year I started pulling it, and by then there was a lot of it in several different places in my yard. It was not until this year that I decided I should find out what it was that I was trying to get rid of.

I google "invasive vine with purple flower" and was able to identify it as Solanum dulcamara, which goes by several common names, most with the word "nightshade" in them.

There are better pictures on the Wikipedia entry, though the text is short.  For more information than you probably want, check the USDA Forestry database.

The plant is not native. It has small berries that are mildly poisonous to humans but not to some birds, which eat the fruit and spread the seeds. It is a perennial, so it keeps coming back year after year. It does have some benefit to wildlife, including birds and bees and some mammals. It is in the same family as the tomato and potato, and it can host bacteria which cause rot in potatoes.

I hope to be nightshade free in a year or two.

The river has risen enough to close the cemetery roads. Below is the road over the creek.

 The river gauge says that the river has peaked and is now starting to recede. We reached moderate flood level and needed six or seven more inches to get to major flooding. We will not set a record for daily stream flow--there was a bigger flood on this date in 1958.

I went to a meeting of the Rensselaer Board of Zoning Appeals last night, the first time I have been to one of their meetings. They do not seem to meet often because they elected officers, something that needs to be done the first time in the year that the board meets. This issue in front of them was a variance to build a garage closer to the property line than the mandated five feet. The contractor for the property owners said that for them to make the turn into the garage with a pickup truck, they needed to have the garage closer to the property line. After discussion about the potential for disputes among neighbors when structures were too close the the line and the problem of roof runoff, the board agreed to a variance that would allow them to have the foundation a foot and a half from the property line with the eave and gutter six inches from the line, and gutters that diverted the runoff away from the neighbors. The procedures were pretty much the same as those used by the county in their Board of Zoning Appeals.

City meetings

Monday was a busy day for city meetings. At 1:00 the Rensselaer Redevelopment Commission and the Rensselaer Redevelopment Authority met to make a couple amendments to the lease that they have involving the proposed fire department building. One involved insurance and the other was about where funds were deposited and both were made so that the bonds that are being issued to fund the new fire station will be rated by Standard and Poor. The bonds are scheduled to be auctioned on June 25. The Commission and the Authority are two different bodies. I do not understand what the function of each is or why two different groups are required, but I am sure that there is a law somewhere that mandates this structure. The Commission met first. After it adjourned, the Authority met. Both meetings were short.

Going to these meetings I noticed that the work on the utility payments offices in the front of city hall was almost complete. The new intercom system is running, so when you enter the building, you are greeted over the intercom by someone in the office. (They take security seriously.)

At 5:30 the Rensselaer Board of Public Works met to approve six pay requests that come from the four construction projects either underway or in the planning stage. The road being constructed in the Drexel Park area has crushed stone forming the base of the road and will be ready for paving in a few weeks. Over the weekend two large pieces of construction equipment were protecting it from anyone foolish enough to try to drive on it.

 The other projects are all in the planning stage: the water line from the fairgrounds to the interstate, the fire station, and the high rate water treatment plant that will be built on Lincoln Street. Below is a picture of what I call Lake Weston. The river has spilled over it banks and flooded the area. The high rate water treatment plant will be built on the shores of this lake. The nearest trees under the dark rain clouds are where it will be. (The rain mostly went to our east last night. I suspect the farmers there did not appreciate the extra moisture.) The river continues to rise and should set the daily record for flow on Tuesday.

The plans for the water treatment plant have been approved by IDEM but now need to be submitted to the USDA.

Board of Public Works meeting lasted about ten minutes, so there was a short wait until the city council meeting began at 6:00.  The first item was a request from the Eagles to shut down Harrison between Front and Van Rensselaer later this month for a fundraiser for a young child or baby that will need surgery. The request was granted. The editor of the Rensselaer Republican was recognized. This was his last council meeting--he is leaving the paper and will be moving to Alabama.

The gas tracker rate of a seven cents decrease per hundred cubic feet was approved, as was a request from the superintendent of the cemetery for a new mower that will cost $6900 after trade-in. The members of the Council had interviewed three candidates for their appointment to the school board and decided to appoint Brad Cozza, who is the manager of the Jasper County Airport.

Requests for funds for funeral flowers and for two upcoming retirements were approved. One of the engines in the powerhouse is down and needs to be repaired. While it is down, it will undergo the maintenance and inspection that was almost due. Finally, Rensselear is getting an award for being the  municipality recycling leader of the year and the mayor and one of the city councilmen will be traveling to Indianapolis to accept the award on Wednesday.

The minutes of the last meeting, which I was unable to attend, are here.

(I forgot to mention in yesterday's post that the fireworks store is back in what was the Sears store in the College Mall. It will be there through the fourth and maybe a week or two later. What was Knights Inn by the Interstate is now the Interstate Motel. I saw the new sign a few weeks ago but did not realize that the name change was recent.)

Rain and meetings and other things

My rain gauge says that we got almost 3 inches of rain Sunday. Other people got more. Rensselaer seemed to be OK but I heard that there was a lot of standing water in fields and that communities to our north got more rain and wind damage. When I went through Weston Cemetery a little after noon today the water had risen to the level of the road where it crosses the creek.

 At the city council meeting I heard that it was over the road, so I went back this evening to take a picture.

 The river has not crested yet, so it may cover a few more roads before it recedes. The heavy rains to our north today may add a few more inches to that crest.

On Sunday I went by what used to be Rico's to see the new sign. It said that the Royal Oak Family Restaurant would be opening soon.

 Today at noon there was a meeting at the hospital of what I thought was the hospital board of trustees, but it turned out to be a meeting of a group I had never before heard of, the Jasper County Hospital Association. This is a group that was formed in the 1980s when the hospital needed to finance an addition. I do not understand why it was needed, but the legal requirements for doing things are often mysterious. In any case, I quickly discovered that the members of the Association were meeting to agree to the transfer of the hospital to the Franciscan Alliance. The hospital has about $20 million in debt, including about $14 million that was borrowed for the most recent expansion from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Development. Franciscan Alliance is not allowed to assume that debt with the transfer. They must pay it off. And because the Jasper County Hospital Association is on the books as the entity that issued the bonds, they had to sign off on the agreement, which they did.

In the discussions before the vote, there were a number of items of interest discussed. By law the Franciscan Alliance must use the property for medical purposes. If they cease to use it for medical purposes, it reverts back to the county. The hospital board, in their negotiations, had several priorities that they wanted in the agreement. The first was that Franciscan Alliance recruit doctors for the community. The board wanted continued community input, and this was provided with a community advisory board. They also wanted the Jasper Hospital Foundation to be kept separate, and one of the effects of that will be to give the community some leverage over the hospital--money talks. The new hospital will have an open door policy with regard to consulting physicians--they will not need to be part of the Franciscan Alliance.

At the public meeting last week, wound care was suggested as a possible service that might be added. At this meeting it was suggested that our local area might not have enough people with diabetes to make that feasible. The hospital CEO was optimistic about the possibilities of tele-medicine, where fast internet connections will allow specialized experts to consult on difficult cases. There will be opportunities for hospital employees to move within the Franciscan Alliance organization, though that may require leaving Rensselaer. The local employees will retain their seniority when they are hired by the Franciscan Alliance.

No one knows yet what the new name will be. In fact, the answer to a lot of questions, both to the local administration and to the people at Franciscan Alliance, is, "We do not know." There are a huge number of decisions and actions that must be made to merge two organizations with different contracts, rules, policies, and procedures. The meeting I attended was one little step in moving the merger along.

The hospital had its own lake today.

I noticed on the way to the hospital that renovations are underway at the Rensselaer Middle School. A bunch of people were working inside and they had pretty well filled two large dumpsters.

The City of Rensselaer had several meetings on Monday, but they can wait until the next post.