Photo By Kelcy Hanson | Contract employees excavate soil from nearby creek bed for rehabilitation of the Coal...... read more read more
For those living and working behind a levee system on a large river like the Illinois Waterway, a major flood can be catastrophic. The economic impact of a levee breach can be tremendous, destroying or disabling businesses, crippling critical infrastructure, and causing untold property damage costing millions, sometimes billions, of dollars to repair.
Chet Esther, a longtime landowner, farmer, and business operator, who lives along the Illinois Waterway near Beardstown, Illinois, is all too familiar with flooding and the destruction it can cause. Ester, along with his sons and their families, lives and works inside an area known as the Coal Creek Drainage and Levee District.
Esther has served as a commissioner for the Coal Creek Drainage and Levee District for more than 40 years and when major flooding in 2019 caused severe erosion to the system, he knew costly repairs were needed. Thanks to the Public Law 84-99 Rehabilitation Program, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Rock Island District, was able to contract repairs to a four-mile stretch of the damaged levee.
“Without the Corps’ help, we would not have been able to fix our levee,” said Esther. “It was a multimillion-dollar project that we just could not have done.”
Public Law 84-99 is an authority allowing USACE to provide direct and technical assistance to tribal, state and local governments prior to, during, and after a flood event. Due to the significant amount of soil that eroded from the Coal Creek levee during the flood, a massive amount of fill was needed to make the repairs.
According to Yukon Curtis, USACE Construction Control Representative for the project, “the project took around six months to complete, and the contractor worked 10 hours a day, six days a week with up to 10 dump trucks each day to move the amount of soil needed to repair the damage.”
The 6,300-acre district, protected by a 12-mile-long earthen levee, primarily houses agricultural land but it also includes portions of three state highways, part of the town of Frederick, and a storage facility capable of holding up to six million bushels of grain.
Landowners living within the district are taxed each year. This money covers energy costs and maintenance of the district’s pumphouse but was insufficient to cover large-scale costs for physical repairs. Through the PL 84-99 Rehabilitation Program, federal and non-federal flood risk management projects that are active in the program, like Coal Creek, may be eligible to receive critical repair assistance for rehabilitation when damaged or destroyed by floods.
According to Esther, getting started with the PL 84-99 Rehabilitation Program was “a little bit painful” because it required getting all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, but in the end, it was the right decision because it allowed them to receive critical repairs to their levee, protecting the livelihoods of those living and working in the area.
| Date Taken: | 12.20.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 12.20.2022 16:40 |
| Story ID: | 435568 |
| Location: | ROCK ISLAND ARSENAL, ILLINOIS, US |
| Web Views: | 48 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Protecting Livelihoods Through the USACE Levee Rehabilitation Program, by Samantha Heilig, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
