April 2011

April 26, 2011April 26, 2011

Dutchtown Gearing Up for Flood

I was planning on getting out of town around noon Monday (which really means around 2 PM). I piddled around waiting for the rain to break so I could load the car and getting a couple of posts ahead on the blog so I could send updates from the motel room along the way.

By the time I got the car loaded, I still had to drop some stuff off in town, so I opted to leave early Tuesday morning. I’m glad I did because the weather was lousy from late afternoon through the evening.

Water’s almost up to Hwy 74

Someone posted on Facebook that Hwy 74 had water almost up to the road. That meant that our property in Dutchtown that I mentioned yesterday might be starting to flood. On the way down to check on it, a state trooper at a roadblock told us that they’re starting to build a levee across the road ahead, so we’d have to turn around.

We took the back way around through Jackson and down Hwy 25. Just as we were pulling into town, we noticed that several houses had tractor trailers backed up in the driveways. They were packing up.

Mother stayed in the car after I pulled into the lane leading to our spot. I walked back up to 74 to see the Fruitland Fire Department setting up a pump on the corner and having a hard time getting it started (more about that later).

Owners trying to fight the water

Most of the activity was around one house directly north of our land. Several of the neighbors had built a makeshift levee between us and them several years back. When Mark, Robin and I were there Sunday, we commented that it didn’t look like it had been maintained since the last flood.

We wondered if anybody would start getting excited once the water was visible in the fields.

Sandbag City

A raft of high school-age kids were filling sandbags and adding to the height of the barrier. I hope it does them some good. We don’t have anything left that the water can hurt much after the 1973 and 1993 floods, but I feel sorry for families who have something to lose.

Pardon my crankiness

On the way back to the car, I saw that the fire department had gotten the pump going.

I know that we’re going under water. I can’t blame the Diversion Channel, the Mississippi River or Mother Nature for that. I WAS a bit put out to see someone deliberately pumping water on us, though.

At least they’re trying. I wish ’em the best. I think Dutchtown is going to go the way of the Red Star District, Smelterville and Wittenberg. At some point, there will be one flood too many.

April 25, 2011April 11, 2021

Rains, Winds and Flooding

I’ve seen some scary winds, torrential rains and high waters living in Florida and covering hurricanes, but I don’t think I’ve seen such continuous rains and bad weather as Southeast Missouri has had in the last week.

I wrote about our encounter with hail. Thunderstorms in Florida pop up every summer afternoon, dump a huge amount of water in a very localized area for a short period of time. It’s not unusual for it to be pouring on one side of the street and dry on the other.

Frog-strangling rain and flood control

What’s been going on in this area is days of steady to frog-strangling rain that just keeps training over us. All of that water has to go somewhere. By the mid-1980s, after a series of disastrous floods that put the Town Plaza and other shopping areas underwater, money was appropriated for a flood control project to handle runoff.

This concrete channel paralleling Kingshighway was part of it. The view above is looking south from old Kingsway toward Broadway. The Masonic Temple is at top left.

Easter in Dutchtown

The Diversion Channel is running full and the Mississippi River is projected to hit 44.5 feet later in the week. As I’ve mentioned before, we have property in Dutchtown that floods at 39 feet on the Cape gauge. I’ve published photos of what we looked like in 1993, when the water reached 48.49 feet.

Brother Mark, his friend Robin, and I ventured to Dutchtown to make sure everything that needed to be high and dry was moved. This huge steel tank that Dad used to use to hold water for dusty roads and for our garden after he retired floated several hundred yards in 1993, dodging the large mechanic shed on the right and a smaller storage shed in the distance.

We wanted to make sure it didn’t become a huge battering ram, so we attached a couple of cables to it so it wouldn’t float away.

Wind took off some tin

Mark climbed up on the roof to replace some tin that had been ripped off in the recent storms. I stayed on the ground to call for help if he fell off. Robin stayed in the car to call for help in case he fell on top of me.

We let a farmer who sharecrops with us store some of his equipment in our storage buildings. He passed by the Diversion Channel this morning and saw that it had come up amazingly fast and decided he had better move the equipment before it was too late. Based on how soggy the ground had become, it looks like he made a wise choice. We must have arrived just after he pulled out.

Cape LaCroix Creek merges

Cape LaCroix Creek, which drains much of northwestern Cape and eventually empties into the Mississippi River, joins the smaller drainage channel between Bloomfield Rd. and Good Hope. The lighter, more muddy-looking water is from Cape LaCroix.

Cape LaCroix goes under Kingshighway

Here’s a view looking south at the merger of the two channels. Cape LaCroix comes in from the right.

Looking south toward Themis

Looking north toward Bessie Street

Water from Old Central High

Water from the neighborhoods around old Central High School feeds in at Bessie Street

Pavement causes rapid runoff

Acres and acres of parking lots and driveways cause rainwater to run off quickly. This pipe is just south of old Kingsway Drive.

Cement canal starts north of Broadway

The cement portion of the project starts just north of Old Kingsway Dr., which is now a dead end road.

Broadway bridge

This is the bridge at Broadway and Kingshighway. Notice how many streams of water join the canal.

Dennis Scivally Park

This water originates in the neighborhoods north of Dennis Scivally Park.

Dennis Scivally Park bridge

Look how much more water there was Sunday than when I shot the bridge last week.

Splashing over Cape Rock Dr. bridge

Ponded water on the Cape Rock Drive bridge sent huge curtains of water skyward when hit by passing cars.

Cape LaCroix Creek at N. Kingshighway

Cape LaCroix Creek boils under Kingshighway just down from Kingsway Dr. on the northwest part of town. The mini-rapid is caused by water crossing over a concrete bridge used to reach the north extension of the bike path.

Bike path underwater

“Impassable during high water” is an understatement. The bike path runs next to the bridge on the left. It’s probably under about three or four feet of fast-moving water.

Headed back home

I’m leaving Cape Monday to make it back to West Palm Beach by mid-week, so I’m going to miss the big flooding. On the other hand, I’m not sorry to put all these rain in the rearview mirror. This is getting old.

I have some good video, including vintage photos of the Town Plaza flooding in the 80s to edit when I get back home. I ran out of time to do it here.

If things are a little slow here for a couple of days, it’s because I’ve run into one too many puddles or that I’m trying to make miles.

April 22, 2011April 5, 2015

THAT’S a Scary Easter Bunny

It’s a wonder that the Boomers weren’t more traumatized than we are. Take a look at this Easter Bunny I was photographed with when I might have been two years old, at most.

The bunny is almost as odd looking as Santa was at the Illmo-Scott City Christmas party.

The Easter it rained

Here is a copy of a family 8-mm home movie that was dubbed over to VHS tape, then digitized. The quality wasn’t all that great to begin with, but you can see us scurrying around like crazy finding eggs all over the basement.

At the end of the movie is a shot of us three boys dressed for church. For the folks who are fans of 1959 Buicks (and there’s a whole website of them), there are some good shots of our car.

Hunting Easter Eggs on Cherry Hill

Here’s a video from the same era when it WASN’T raining. You can see more photos on the page I did last year about hunting eggs on Capaha Park’s Cherry Hill in the 60s.

April 21, 2011April 22, 2011

Cape La Croix Creek Marker

As long as I can remember, a simple concrete cross stood at the intersection of Kingsway Drive and Kingshighway. I have to admit that I knew it had to do with something historical, but I wasn’t exactly sure what.

Still, it disturbed me that something that had been a Cape Girardeau landmark since 1947 would be displaced in 2009, so a commercial building could be built and some public land swapped around.

I was looking for a couple of other landmark monuments Thursday when I ran across my old friend, the cross, at the corner of William and South Main, on the grounds of the St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church.

Cross relocated on Good Friday

A new plaque says the monument was originally dedicated Oct. 12, 1947 at the LaCroix Creek site on N. Kingshighway. Relocated to this site on Good Friday, April 10, 2009 and rededicated Easter Sunday April, 4, 2010.

The original plaque says, “In 1699, Fathers Montigny, Davion and St. Cosme, French missionaries, erected a cross where this stream entered the Mississippi and prayed that this might be the beginning of Christianity among the Indians. The stream has ever since been known as Cape La Croix Creek.”

I find it interesting that one monument could have two different spellings for the name of the stream that it recognizes: Cape La Croix Creek and LaCroix Creek.

Kingsway and Kingshighway 1966

Kingshighway is on the left. Kingsway is on the right. At one time, the road that went by the names Old Jackson Road and 3-Mile Creek Road met Kingshighway at a 45 degree angle. State guidelines required that intersections should meet at 90-degrees, so the road was curved slightly to the west.

The monument was located in the dark brush area just west of the old intersection of Old Jackson Rd. and Kingshighway.

The area has changed drastically. Kurre Lane, at the bottom right, has been extended to Kingshighway and a fire station sits on the corner. The two farms and their barns have been torn down. The cow pastures we used to look over have homes planted on them.

Cross on St. Vincent’s grounds 2011

The cross now lives on the southeast corner of the St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church grounds (marked by the yellow arrow). The Red House is at the bottom of the photo and the Jewish Synagogue is the white building with red trim on the lower right.

If the original intent was to mark the meeting of Cape LaCroix Creek and the Mississippi River, I guess the new location is probably about as close to the actual spot as the 1947 location.

Still, it bugs me that a landmark was uprooted for what appears to be someone’s commercial gain.

UPDATE Kingsway-Kingshighway in 2010

Some folks asked what’s at the Kingshighway-Kingsway intersection today.

Here is an aerial photo I shot Nov. 6, 2010. It’s almost easier to list what’s NOT there. A Plaza Tire store is about where the cross stood. The large building complex at the bottom is the Osage Center; the new water park was under construction to its right. Storage units and a housing development cover what used to be two farms and their fields.