Flood of 2007 still resonates: Iolans reflect on deluge

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June 30, 2017 - 12:00 AM

Ten years ago this weekend Iola’s southern landscape changed forever.
An already wet spring and summer led to a brutal four-day stretch in late June 2007, during which 17 inches of rain fell through a series of downpours, leading to the area’s worst flooding since 1951.
The worst of the storms came June 30 when the skies opened before sunrise and storms continued unabated for more than 12 hours. By the time the rain stopped, nearly 11 inches had fallen.
The rains sent the Neosho River and other nearby waterways spilling from their banks.
Elm Creek floodwaters quickly enveloped several homes through the south part of town the morning of June 30; and it didn’t recede for three days.
More than 120 homes were lost.
The flood also took a devastating toll on Riverside Park, after Elm Creek waters washed away a large chunk of the old elevated Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad corridor, filling the park with more than 8 feet of water.
“We knew we were in for a disaster, but we didn’t know how bad it was going to be until the rain stopped,” noted Judy Brigham. “And it never did.”
Brigham was Iola city administrator when the 2007 flood left its waterlogged mark on Iola, and much of southeast Kansas.
To mark the 10-year anniversary of the flood, the Register talked with Brigham as well as Park Superintendent Berkley Kerr, Assistant City Administrator Corey Schinstock and Teresa Murphey, who was among the residents in Davis Addition who saw their homes inundated. (She and husband Ed were among the few who were able to save their homes.)
 
“I STARTED as Iola city administrator in 2006,” Brigham recalled. “There were all kinds of things I thought I was going to do. But the flood kind of defined my job.”
She and Iola’s department heads headed for City Hall that fateful June day when it became evident Iola was in for a doozy.
“You could hear the constant rain, and it just wouldn’t let up,” Brigham said. “There was so much chaos in so many cities. One of our biggest troubles was convincing people we were going to be flooded.”
By 7 a.m. June 30 — a Saturday — city and county officials sounded a Code Red Alert, ordering residents in south Iola to evacuate.
But the evacuation took several hours, as residents struggled to decide what to pack, what to leave behind. Others ignored the call altogether. “Nobody thinks it’s going to happen to them,” Brigham said.
“You’re worried about the people living in that area, but you’re also worried about the city employees working through it, because nobody had been through anything like this before,” she said. “Of course, there was the Flood of ’51, but none of our employees were around then. We had guys in boats shutting off gas and electric meters. We had police in boats trying to rescue people.”
She recalled Iola police officer Mike Ford driving a bus to shuttle evacuees to a Red Cross shelter at Allen Community College.
 
AFTER A few hours, he returned to City Hall to remove his kevlar vest, partly for fear of it weighing him down if he had to make it through deep water.
“I’m pretty sure there’s no manual around that says if you’re driving a bus in a flood to take off your kevlar vest,” Brigham said with a laugh. “These were things we just didn’t know about.
“That may have been our first big success. There were no deaths; nobody was badly hurt.”
She noted another quirk.
Part of the city’s emergency preparedness strategy was for the American Red Cross to set up emergency shelter where needed.
“Guess where the plan was to put the shelter?” Brigham asked. “Riverside Park.”
With that option literally washed away, the city reached out to ACC officials, who agreed to provide facilities for the next few days.
“There were so many volunteers who never got recognition for what they did,” Brigham said.
 
THE FLOOD, at one point or another, shut off access to Iola from all four directions. U.S. 169 flooded north of town along Deer Creek, and south of town at Elm Creek. Rock Creek crossed U.S. 54 on the east side; the Neosho River on the west.
“We were truly an island,” Brigham said.
Kerr, meanwhile, was at the park, having put all he could in the park’s office up on chairs and tables, in case water breached what then was the New Community Building. His focus then shifted to the swimming pool, where he tried in vain to pump water out of the basement.
“Little good that did,” he laughed. “It was coming in faster than we could pump it out.”
Then, after the railroad dike was breached, water came pouring in. Kerr and other parks employees quickly scrambled to safety.
“The funny part was, about two or three days before the flood, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was in town to inspect the levees,” Kerr recalled. “We were hoping they’d certify all of it, including the railway.”
The engineers refused, Kerr said. Rightly so, in retrospect.
However, once the floodwater entered the park, the levees and rail corridor — seemingly built to keep water out — suddenly kept the water in place, turning the park into a big bathtub.
It wasn’t until Kerr used an excavator three days later to knock a hole in the rail corridor did the floodwater escape. City officials estimated using pumps alone to remove the water would have taken months.
“I remember walking around the park afterward, and it looked like everything had been covered with chocolate milk,” Brigham said.
The most poignant moments, she said, came during cleanup.
One of the employees helping with trash crews noted the sheer volume of belongings they were removing.
“This wasn’t trash,” Brigham said. “These were people’s treasures, their belongings. This wasn’t stuff they wanted to throw away. It was stuff they had to throw away”
 
MANY folks move from the city to the country when they get older, Teresa Murphey said.
“In our case, the country came to us,” she said with a chuckle.
“We have a lot more wildlife come around here. The groundhogs are terrible. We’ve always had possums, but now we have possums, groundhogs and skunks, stuff like that.”
The Murpheys live at 312 W. Campbell St., the same house Teresa’s family moved to when she was 3 months old.
“I grew up here,” she explained. “My grandmother moved down to this area in 1974. My parents lived at the corner. My daughter and her kids moved across the street. We had five generations at one point.”
They live in what was then the heart of the Davis Addition.
“There were always kids in our neighborhood,” likely because of the proximity to Riverside Park, where summer evenings were filled with activities.
Now, the Murpheys have the only house still standing on their block. Daughter Angie’s house is the only one on the other side of the street.
“It’s a lot quieter, which is nice, I guess,” Teresa said, “but it’s also sad. My parents didn’t want to move, but they had to.”
The Murphy’s home was filled with 3 ½ feet of water. Damage was contained to the first floor, which they essentially stripped down to the wooden skeleton and replaced. They also replaced electrical and heating systems.
“It was nice to save the house, but if we had to do it again, there are things we could have done better,” she said. “As far as rebuilding, we’d use better stuff. We tried to stretch our dollars as far as they could go. Now, it’s been 10 years, and we’ve had to do things over again.”
She also blames the flood, at least in part, for a series of maladies that have afflicted her and her husband over the past decade.
“We worked so hard after that,” she recalled. “It wasn’t long after that Ed had to undergo back surgery. I’ve had a bad back, but it didn’t require surgery.”
Land east of their home was replaced with a series of soccer fields utilized by the Iola Recreation Department.
“We get quite a bit of traffic on those days,” she said.
They also get the occasional passerby, looking to see how much the neighborhood has changed. “Sightseers,” Teresa calls them.
She appreciates steps the city has taken to utilize the vacated areas — FEMA regulations prevent construction on those properties — by converting them into such venues as the soccer fields, and the disc golf course along Elm Creek.
“I’d like to see the city do something for some older folks, too,” she said. “Maybe something like croquet. I can’t run, and do a lot of things any more, but older people, even in a wheelchair, could hit a croquet ball.”
 
IN THE aftermath, the city worked tirelessly with FEMA officials, both on the city’s behalf, and for the affected residents.
It took more than three years to complete a voluntary buyout of more than 110 residences. Delays were common as residents scrambled to find deeds, insurance records and the like.
“You may have had a house in a single family, where a handshake deal or a note was all they had to prove ownership,” Brigham said. “I don’t know how we could have done things differently, to help people any quicker than we did. Some people did very well. They were able to build safer, newer homes.”
Others, however, struggled to stay afloat.
Brigham noted many residents were given lump sums at the start of the recovery effort, and spent money on other emergencies, leaving little for their homes.
For the city, things went a little smoother, but still slowly.
“It was torture,” Kerr said. “We’d get one FEMA guy here for two weeks, then he’d be replaced by another FEMA guy who would ask for the exact same reports we gave the first one. I soon learned to make four copies of everything, because we were going to need them.”
It was through FEMA, and through legislation sponsored by former State Sen. Derek Schmidt, now Kansas attorney general, that paved the way to Iola’s recovery.
State funds were made available to communities like Iola, Coffeyville and Independence to assist with infrastructure. In Iola’s case, it allowed the city to extend streets and utilities north of Miller Road in order to convert a portion of Cedarbrook Golf Course into a new neighborhood.
Tom Carlson eventually built more than 50 rent-controlled properties, the Dean family built a senior housing complex, and USD 257 building trades students constructed two homes.
“It didn’t replace the homes that were lost, but it did add to Iola’s housing stock,” Schinstock said.
FEMA officials also allowed the city to use funds that would have gone to replace 1930s era steam generators to use for the swimming pool in Riverside Park.
Did such a strategy harm Iola in the end, now that the city is in danger of not having enough electrical capacity?
No, responds Schinstock — for two reasons.
One, the city would not have received nearly enough money to pay for new generators. “You can’t just put that money in the bank, either,” he said.
Secondly, it was much less expensive for the city to simply buy generating capacity from other communities, than to immediately replace them.
“These were generators that were going to be mothballed anyway,” Brigham agreed.
As an aside, Iola City Council members discussed Monday options to acquire used generators because the city may not be able to purchase electric capacity from Chanute after 2020. The price tag was pegged between $1.2 million and $1.8 million.
“Rather than not get any of that FEMA money, they allowed us to do an alternate project, which in this case was to replace the pool,” Brigham said. “Thank goodness Berkley kept such meticulous notes about the pool, because he was able to prove to FEMA without a doubt it was the flood that ruined the (old) pool.”
 
BRIGHAM and Kerr both said despite the heartbreak from 2007, Iola has emerged a stronger community.
“You have a rec building that’s used all year long,” Brigham said. “You didn’t have that before the flood.”
“The facilities at the park are better than they’ve ever been,” Kerr agreed.
Notably, FEMA also fully funded — and then some — a city-built skate park.
It was the recovery effort, Kerr opined, that led — directly or indirectly — to a number of improvements, such as the city’s trail system.
In the flood’s aftermath, city officials removed the rail corridor altogether on the east side of the park, after it was determined the breach came through primarily loose rock and ballast. They replaced that washed away with several layers of dirt and clay, each tightly packed on another.
The ridge, meanwhile, was covered with limestone screening as part of the Southwind Trail, which extends from Iola to Humboldt.
Kerr anticipates the new levee is much more flood-proof than its predecessor.
But he’s also in no hurry to test it.
“At least not in my lifetime,” Kerr joked.
 
THERE have been a few torrential downpours, which have caused minor flooding in and around Iola since 2007. But nothing of the magnitude of that storm a decade ago.
Still, Teresa Murphey and her family keep a close watch when rainy weather is forecast.
“I hate to say it, but we need a little rain now,” she said with a laugh. “Or at least I’m not going to say it very loud.”

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