Midwest railroad bridge collapses amid heavy rain and flooding (yahoo.com)
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We’ve certainly built back better these past few years.
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In southern MN there is also big time flooding.
Aren’t you in danger of losing a dam at the moment?
Outside of Mankato MN a dam will go soon. A business and a substation nearby has already been destroyed.
I’m NW of Minneapolis and thankfully we haven’t had as much rain as southern MN, but we’ve had a lot!
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It hasn’t collapsed as of yet-msm is wrong.
Local media- Caught on video: Flooded Blue Earth River sweeps away building at Rapidan Dam in Minneosta | Fox Weather
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[quote=“Dan, post:8, topic:41588”]
Local media- [Caught on video: Flooded Blue Earth River sweeps away building at Rapidan Dam in Minneosta [/quote]
How long before the deluge of readers angry over “Minneosta”?
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They should!
So when do we in Israel get blamed for this?
Jk…
It’s a shame this is happening during the build back better administration. But it’s gonna be a familiar sight around the country till the real adults get back in
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I think it has nothing to do with any political party but with the dam being plugged up with debris, on photos on can see tree trunks up against the dam.
Who ever is in charge of the state waterways is responsible for maintaining said waterways if it be state run county run or federal. Taxes were paid… and service wasn’t rendered… sounds political to me… the railroad bridge falls under private and federal jurisdiction.
According the the DNR, the tree trunks have been churned up from the river floor by the fast moving river.
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Tragic. Glad it is not a “big one” like along the TVA system, e.g., Wolf Creek Dam. A dam collapsed in Michigan four years ago. It was just before the unrest started so the story took the back page.
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Railroad museum flooded, too:
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That’s too bad. I feel bad for everyone in those regions and their losses due to the flooding. 
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It’s personal for me. I grew up in Paducah, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. Our town is protected from the river by a flood wall that was built after the 1937 flood inundated the city. I remember as a kid when the usual flooding would increase and there would be concerns and flood warnings all around us. When it gets really scary is when they would close the gates and sandbag the thing. It was both exciting and terrifying. A few times the water got up and lapped at the flood wall, I think they were one or two times at it actually got about halfway up. When they built the flood wall, they built it 3 feet higher than the crest of the 1937 flood. In 2011 the river did flood such that there was concern that water might actually top the flood wall. I think it crested about 5 ft below the top of the wall.
And that’s just the river being gorged with rain. At the foot of Broadway is the confluence of the Ohio and the Tennessee rivers. 22 miles upstream of the confluence is Kentucky Dam, the longest of the TVA system. One mile away is Barkley Dam, another big dam holding another massive lake, and it is 41 river miles from the dam to the city. Kentucky dam goes back Kentucky lake, with something like 40,000 square miles of water.
This might be interesting. Dad and his friends bought a lake for hunting and fishing purposes about a mile and a half from the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Much of the time it wasn’t very useful because it was either dry as a bone for fishing, or too flooded to get to the duck blinds. Dad had a friend who had a well digging business and they designed and created floating duck blinds. There was one day we went hunting, and over the course of the day, the river dropped it seemed like 10 ft. Fortunately the floating blind just rode the level of the water. Dad and his friends wanted to control the water better, but there was a bunch of beavers who kept building a dam across the creek that fed and drained the lake. They politely ask the beavers to leave but when the obstinate little beasts refused, they got a license and dynamited damn. The lake drained nicely. But then they needed it to fill back up and there is nothing to fill it until the next flood season came. So they installed a big irrigation valve and built their own damn. That worked well for maintainence. Eventually, we were able to sometimes keep the lake where we needed it, wet or dry. They also decided to make fish attractors and Sam, the well digger, dynamited some holes in the lake bed. I wish I had a camera back then because it’s amazing the size of the hole a single stick of dynamite will blow into the silty bottom of a oxbow lake.
So that’s my flood and dam background.
Some may ask what any of this has to do with railroading? Is this not off topic? Had it not been for these recent articles to remind me of my experiences, I may not be on this site. The site may not even exist. In 1987 for the 50th anniversary of the flood the newspaper published the map of Paducah at the time of the flood, showing where the flood waters got to. It included of course roads and the like, the like being railroads. To get to the airport I flew out of, I had to cross over an abandoned railroad track. I had no idea what railroad it was. Thanks to that map, it I learned it was the N.C.&StL. The St Louis part I could figure out but the rest I had no idea. Fortunately, I found that map in my scrapbook right after I acquired my first computer, and I started looking it up and found out it was the Dixie Line, the Nashville, Chattanooga and St Louis. While learning about it, I found other unknown railroads in the region such as the Cotton Belt, and the Frisco. And I found out that railroads I did know of, i.e., Missouri Pacific, Louisville in Nashville, Burlington, Mobile & Ohio, were closer than I ever imagined. Reading about those introduced me to more and more railroads I found interesting, and that’s how I revived my interest in railroading as the 6.3rd billionth most knowledgeable person in the world, which brought me back into model railroading, which brought us to here.
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Well, as far as I am concerned, it is my post so feel free to share whatever you wish to. Thank you for the stories. I have been through three floods in my lifetime. One on our ranch in Montana, and the other two when I lived in Wyoming. They were nothing to the extent of what is going on now, but still…
Thank you and thank you to the others for adding to this post.
Randy 