Courtesy Photo | North Dakota National Guard Soldiers unload sandbags from a dump truck, with two lines...... read more read more
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JAMESTOWN, N.D. - Late Wednesday night, April 22, the Jamestown City Works Department called the North Dakota National Guard's flood operations center in Jamestown. Water was nearly up to the house foundations in the 800-900 block of 3rd Ave. N.W. Sandbags and sandbaggers were needed as soon as possible. They suggested rubber overshoes.
A half-hour later, the Guard was on site.
"We had 75 Soldiers there. We took some of both our light QRF [quick reaction force] and heavy
QRF," said Capt. Mark J. McEvers, full-time battalion operations officer for the 136th Combat Sustainment Support Brigade. The "heavy" QRF has larger equipment, such as a loader, excavator and dozer. The "light" QRF does not.
"We took everyone that was coming off shift, plus part of the night shift," McEvers said. "Soldiers that had already put in a full day's shift [12 hours] put in an extra seven hours to ensure homes were safe and support the city of Jamestown.
"We had three sites going at once. The total was six houses and tying in an alley, and we used 5,700 sandbags. We had three dump trucks full of sandbags standing by for our QRFs, but most came from the city's sandbag reserve. We backed our trucks into the yards to get the sandbags as close as possible."
According to McEvers, this was one of the bigger missions to date. "Nobody ever thought the water would get that high. The Jamestown Dam has never released this much water before."
Water releases that day were almost double the previous record. Releases were 1,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) from Pipestem Dam and 2,000 cfs from Jamestown Dam, or 3,000 cfs total. The two waterways meet at Jamestown, so the figures are usually combined. The previous record, set in 1997, was 1,750 cfs for the two together, according to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
representative.
Spc. Jason R. Copley, Fargo, was one of the sandbaggers. He is a D7 dozer and 916 tractor trailer driver for the heavy QRF. He serves as a heavy equipment operator/carpentry and masonry specialist for the 188th Engineer Company (Vertical) in Wahpeton and also works in non-military construction. Copley has been doing flood work for the Guard for 10 days, first in Fargo and now in Jamestown.
"The mission was about average size," he said. "It's just that the water was right there. We had hours instead of days to finish it.
"I like doing something where you're helping out, saving people's houses," Copley said.
| Date Taken: | 04.22.2009 |
| Date Posted: | 04.24.2009 14:28 |
| Story ID: | 32838 |
| Location: | JAMESTOWN, US |
| Web Views: | 131 |
| Downloads: | 113 |
This work, Night Sandbag Mission for Soldiers in Jamestown, by SGT Ann Knudson, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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