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Floods swamp city
The city of Mountain Home is currently recuperating from last weekend's storms that brought approximately 2-3 inches of rain and severe hail, causing flooding throughout the city.
The first of the two storms began late Friday afternoon and concluded late Friday night. Several areas of the city flooded, including the underpass and the downtown area, where water overflowed the gutters and lapped at the doorways of businesses. It took nearly two hours for the city's stormwater disposal system to clear the area.
As the city worked to recover from Friday's storm and the water began to dissipate, Saturday's storm brought in a more severe and chaotic thunderstorm that fell on land already saturated with water and unable to handle the extra rain.
During the storms, units from the Mountain Home Fire Department handled the pumping of the excess water and laid out sandbags at numerous locations around town while units from the Mountain Home Police Department and Citizens on Patrol handled traffic control.
With calls coming in to dispatch from all over the city reporting flooding, within 20 minutes after Saturday's storm began Cpl. Stan Winnings, shift supervisor of the Mountain Home Police Department, put together an incident command post/emergency operations center at the police station at 8 p.m., composed of key city employees, the mayor and law enforcement, that attempted to coordinate the flood mitigation efforts.
"It was very helpful and helped to get all the information sent into one central command," said Rist.
Flooding occurred throughout the city in one of the worst flood cases since 1986. Fire Chief Phil Gridley noted, however, that "I've never seen storms like this go back to back in Mountain Home."
Although the official rainfall measurement from the National Weather Service indicated only .58 inches of rain fell Friday and Saturday, combined, a rain gauge at the Ketterling Dairy just south of town recorded over five inches of rain, Gridley said.
"This was an unprecedented amount of water that came down and the length of time that it rained. We've all said that we've seen it rain like this before, but never for this length of time," Rist said.
The area located between North 8th East and East 14th North was flooded, according to Rist. One of the contributing factors of the flooding was the breaching of Bledsoe Pond, designed to hold excess storm water.
The excess water at Bledsoe Pond was pumped to the state ponds on American Legion Boulevard by the Mountain Home Fire Department.
The area between Foster St. and N. Haskett St. was flooded due to a drainage pond exceeding capacity. The breached water made its way into the subdivision's cul de sac, but was later pumped and the area dried.
Another area that was affected by the storms, was Brookside Court in southwest Mountain Home where some residents took to water craft to move around. The city plans on exercising an easement from Brookside Court to the pond at South 5th West, in order to construct a drainage line for future storms.
The area between Main Street and East 8th North was flooded and the water pumped toward Albertson's, where the water then flowed down the street toward the underpass.
The drainage pond at the Silverstone Subdivision was breached slightly from the storms. The water ran down the north end of the pond, but was later diverted to a nearby field and no further property damage was caused.
Other areas that were flooded due to the storms included South 5th West, South 13th East and Tiger Alley at Mountain Home High School.
According to Rist, the city has decided on two solutions to avoid further flooding of Tiger Alley -- to either construct another drainage facility on school property or to pipe the drainwater to a drainage site at the junior high school.
During the storms, the underpass was closed on two different occasions. The underpass has three pumps that were unable to pump the water out based on the volume of water that was flowing in and that caused the underpass to be backed up. Two cars were reported Saturday to have stalled at the bottom of the underpass.
"Clearly, if you have 12, 14, or 16 inches of water at the bottom of underpass, you don't want cars shooting down there at 25 mph getting stuck down there," said Rist.
The water from the underpass was later pumped to the state ponds, which reportedly were never breached.
On Sunday, 24 hours after the storms, Rist and City Public Works Director Wayne Shepherd drove to the areas of town that were affected by the storms. Remarkably, a majority of those areas were barren by then from the flooded water. The last area in town that was still being pumped out was at Gunfighter Subdivision, where a retention pond had breached.
On Monday, Mountain Home Mayor Tom Rist organized a debriefing with several city officials to discuss the events of last weekend's storms and generate plans for further storm preparation.
"We're going to do everything we can. This has given us an indication that we have a few deficiencies in regards to how we're taking care of our stormwater drainage."
As result of the meeting, the city will work on an action plan that will later be presented to Mayor Rist and the city council to avoid or mitigate any future flooding. The city also will go over items including the re-evaluation of the design criteria for the newest subdivisions, criteria that will include considering if retention pond capacity is exceeded.
According to Shepherd, over the last four years, the four newest retention ponds that have been built in Mountain Home either reached capacity or exceeded capacity in the weekend's storms.
Torrential rains also fell last week, on Tuesday evening, in Glenns Ferry, which overwhelmed the city's drainage system, forcing public works employees to work well into the next morning.
Unable to keep up with the downpour, the drainage system backed up in the East Cleveland Avenue area, flooding the basements or crawlspaces of three homes. Silt and debris also clogged a section of pipe that runs along the East Madison Avenue easement, causing a line failure and sending thousands of gallons of runoff and raw sewage onto private property.
The city operates a "dual" system in which street runoff and sewage share the same line. This type of system is no longer allowed.
City crews were called out and a backhoe was brought in to excavate a deep trench to divert the runoff away from buildings. The high volume of water undermined a manhole causing it to collapse.
The next day, city workers returned to the site and began clean up efforts. Cook contacted the Environmental Protection Agency, but as of last Thursday his call had not been returned.
A similar problem that occurred several years ago in the same location did not require an environmental clean up. City crews spread lime to eliminate odor and kill some of the bacteria.
"I think they [city crews] did an excellent job of fixing the problem and cleaning up. It was just one of those things," said property owner Gardner Brown.