Pribek

I’ve been away for a couple of days. Driving down Joe Bald Road, early this evening, I noticed a lot of small twigs and leaves had blown down. A little further on, there were pockets of hail, ankle deep, on the side of the road. I just missed that storm.

The big topic across the Ozarks is the floods. That’s what people are talking about.

This is from KY3, yesterday.

Jim Sandberg, Table Rock Lake’s operation project manager, says it hopes by June 1 that it can have Table Rock Lake a manageable level. On Tuesday, the lake had only two-tenths of an inch of storage capacity remaining.

Same guy, Jim Sandberg, from a Q and A piece in the News Leader this morning.

Q: What is the likelihood of future releases at Table Rock Dam?

Sandberg: “We are at a higher potential for higher releases at Table Rock simply because we don’t have the storage capacity we had. We actually went from 926.9 to 933, which is a little over 2 feet above our flood pool. We don’t have that luxury today. We’re near the top of our flood storage capacity. Matter of fact, we’ve only got enough capacity to handle two-tenths of an inch of runoff. Once we have that…we get into flood pool and we have to start making some changes. Whether we can make those releases through hydropower turbine releases or a combination of hydropower and spillway gates will be determined by the amount of rain and how long the duration and the amount of rain that’s actually on the ground.”

Q: Why hasn’t the corps been gradually releasing water through spring, knowing rains were coming?

Sandberg, in an earlier statement: “Under normal circumstances, each lake would collect rainfall and runoff. Then, dam operators would release that water gradually over time as channel capacity downstream became available, allowing more flood storage to build in the lakes. However, persistent flooding along the lower White River system has prevented those gradual releases over time, as Corps Reservoir Control continues to manage the water to reduce flood crests downstream. Making any ‘pre-releases’ to increase reservoir storage capacity in this situation, while potentially beneficial to some, would only worsen the flooding of others downstream.”

I’m glad I don’t have Mr. Sandberg’s trouble. It has been raining buckets, constantly, for the last three hours. The ground was already saturated. The gravel road leading into the campground was like a briskly flowing mountain stream.

So, that 2/10ths of an inch capacity they had to play with is a memory.