Dike a problem for 6 months
Staff writer
An upstream floodgate control broke in March but was already damaged, rendering the gate “non-functional” as far back as October, according to an Army Corps of Engineers inspection.
A nearly 30-foot-long stem that raises and lowers the gate was discovered to be bent in the fall, City Manager Brian Wells said.
It could be “babied” or “coaxed” into moving, he said, contending “it wasn’t failed.” But the gate, protecting Marion’s valley from potential flooding from Mud and Clear Creeks, was essentially stuck at half open.
The bent stem broke in March when city crews were trying to operate it.
The city, which manages the levee, has been struggling without success since October to find anyone in Kansas qualified to fix the equipment, Wells said.
The first public mention of the problem by the city was at the Cottonwood Valley Drainage Board meeting in February.
At the meeting, drainage board directors discussed the “urgency” of gate repair with Wells, according to minutes of that meeting.
The mayor and city council members did not respond to Record emails asking about handling of the floodgate.
Wells said he was uncertain exactly when the city council became aware of the problem. No one who attended city council meeting to report on them for the Record can recall it being mentioned before April 20.
The “malfunction” of the gate concerns the drainage board, directors said in an statement Tuesday.
“If the gate cannot be closed it adds controllable water” to already existing runoff within the levee and could result “in downtown flooding.”
“The levee isn’t complete without that valve,” Peggy Blackman said.
She was Marion mayor when the levee was built in the late 1970s and recalls pre-levee times when, almost every spring and summer, city streets had at least some degree of flooding.
She also points to historical marker at the Marion Post marking how water rose three feet above the floor in the devastating 1951 flood.
Blackman became something of an expert in water during 13 years working as a reservoir watershed coordinator and driving hours with a city superintendent to monitor the headwaters of the area’s watershed before the levee was complete.
Realizing how long the floodgate has been non-functional, her first thought was that city leaders “don’t have history” — meaning the levee is taken for granted.
Also, she questioned whether city crews still closely followed the levee’s operation manual, which historically contained very detailed methods for operating the delicate floodgate stems.
“If high water occurs before repairs are completed, standard floodfighting measures can be implemented to mitigate or slow the flow of water and help protect the area,” Jordan Holmes, levee safety program manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, wrote in an email.
The most likely mitigation would be to pile sandbags in the hole the gate slides in, both Holmes and Wells said.
But, Wells added, this could require difficult and costly cleanup after the gate finally is fixed.
In an October inspection report, Holmes rated the floodgate “minimally acceptable” and its risk as “low.”