Friday, June 17, 2011

Hamburg Holds Back the Big Muddy

The town of Hamburg, Iowa is holding back the flood waters of the Missouri river. The little town sits in a break in the Loess Hills where the Nishnabotna River joins the Missouri River.



The primary levee broke earlier in the week, and all hope for the town now resides in a temporary levee constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with the help of the Iowa National Guard.



I drove through Hamburg just a few weeks ago. It is a pretty little town in the extreme southwest corner of Iowa. The lower part of the town flooded in 1993. Residents have been evacuated and have been removing belongings out of their homes for the last couple of weeks as high waters have risen from upstream dam discharges in the Dakotas.

With farmland between the town and the river already flooded and the high waters not expected to recede for a couple of weeks, Hamburg is stuck waiting out the Big Muddy behind the temporary levee.

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