News : Lessons learned: What last week\'s flood taught us

I know that when you read this article, you will probably have come across the HESCO sand barriers that were put up by the City of Vinton on East 2nd Street and 2nd Avenue. City crews have already begun the process of removing some of the barriers blocking the 3rd Street intersection on 2nd Avenue. By some views, the process of putting up the barriers may be seen as a waste of time and effort since we didn’t get the flooding that was forecasted. Despite the fact that we are fortunate not to have experienced severe flooding this time, the effort was not wasted. We did learn some valuable lessons from what basically became an emergency drill.

We learned that we had a good plan in place with the HESCO barriers and the stockpiled sand. This idea was originally envisioned by the Vinton Municipal Electric Utility. The City supported the plan by purchasing additional barriers and providing the equipment and labor to stockpile the sand. The sand was placed in an emergency stockpile since access to sand at Coots Materials is impossible during a flooding event.

We learned that it doesn’t take very long to put up the barriers. The City began to set up the barriers on Thursday afternoon, and by that time we had our first line of defense established. The next set of barriers, to complete a route to get past flood waters to the facilities was established during the day on Friday. This effort was aided by several local volunteers and AmeriCorps members to help set up the barriers and to pack the sand into the barriers. Now, we are beginning to learn how the barriers can be removed in a way to reuse them and the sand inside.

What else did we learn from this event? We learned that following through after the 2008 flood to remove houses from flood-prone areas was a good idea. Several locations that were flooded during this “minimal” flood once had houses that would have had some flooding issue. We also know that protecting the main sewer lift station by the river was a good idea since a barrier could quickly be put in place without the enormous sandbagging effort that was expended in 2008.

We also learned a couple of other things that we already knew: we live in a community that really cares and is not afraid to lend a hand. Besides the volunteers that came out to help, several businesses; such as Fareway, Tootsie’s, Pizza Ranch, Pizza Hut and McDonald’s helped to deliver food to the volunteers. Another reaffirming item was that we are very fortunate to have AmeriCorps in our community. Many team members came downtown to help. The City of Vinton wants to thank all the businesses and individuals who put forth the effort to help!