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Levee breaks repaired … again

When it rains, it pours. And when it pours, those large amounts of rain can damage levees in the Vandalia area.

The commissioners of the Vandalia Levee and Drainage District know that all too well, dealing with significant damage to district levees for the third time in 14 years.
Ken Cripe said on Tuesday that the major flooding at the end of last year caused 12 breaks in the levee system, “from the Vera bridge down to about Woodyard. That includes three major levee breaks between Interstate 70 on the north side of town and U.S. Route 40 on the south side.
“It’s a major deal again,” said Cripe, who serves as a district commissioner along with Randy Braun and Virgil Carson.
He said that he and other commissioners have completed both ground and aerial inspections of the levee system, and are now in the process of repairing the breaks.
As of Tuesday, repairs on one of the breaks, just outside Vandalia on the east side of the Kaskaskia River, had been completed, he said.
It’s important to get those repairs done as quickly as possible, he said, “because it won’t be too long until people (within the district) are farming again,” Cripe said.
“There is some protection on most of the levees,” he said.
The district has hired three local contractors to make the repairs, he said.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers offers a program through which it provides 80 percent funding for such repairs, but participation in that program is not feasible for the local district, Cripe said.
That’s because the district has to go through the application process and then go through a bidding process if its application is approved. Then the funds are made available, he said.
That process, Cripe said, might take a year, and the district has to get the work done as soon as possible in order to provide the best possible protection to farmland as the planting of corn and soybeans nears.
“We can’t wait on that (funding),” he said.
The district includes about 12,000 acres and has about 30 miles of levees, which includes about 13 miles of river levees and 17 miles of internal levees, he said.
Inside the district boundaries are “70-some landowners,” and they are taxed $14 per acre, Cripe said.
Commissioners are having to deal with the large number of levee breaks as the district is still suffering from the work needed to repair breaks caused by flooding in 2013.
“We haven’t recovered from paying for that work,” Cripe said. “We’re almost $300,000 in debt.”
And he guesses that the cost to repair the most-recent breaks could climb to as high as $500,000, adding that it’s hard at this point to arrive at a close estimate.
The 2013 repairs were made as the district was still fighting to recover from the flooding in 2002, which was so bad that it caused the closure of U.S. Route 51 south of town and U.S. Route 40 east of town for an extended period, as well as the collapse of a bridge on Route 40.
“That was the year that really took us down,” Cripe said.

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