Saturday, June 14, 2008

Two 500 year floods in fifteen years?

Ok, we move immediately from Ken's hospital stay to an unprecedented second battle with the Mississippi River at my company, Gardner Denver.



No time for pictures or much writing but the company newspaper happened to catch me 'at work' so I'm including that here along with the latest brief update from that paper, GDToday on what's going on at the company.




Employees Praised For Their Efforts Battling Rising River

Mark Chiado, the Environmental and Safety Director can't say enough about the efforts of employees at the Quincy facility. " They have done an outstanding job. A representative from the Corps of Engineers was here and he couldn't believe that we accomplished what we did in three days".
While sandbagging efforts continue, the attention continues to focus on Quincy where rising waters could match 1993 flood stages. While that flood was called a hundred year flood, the flood of 2008 has already been dubbed with the label of a 500 year flood.
Up north in Cedar Rapids, Iowa over 400 city blocks have been flooded and the city's water supply threatened. Fortunately the majority of Quincy sits high on a bluff and is not affected by the river's rise, but some businesses at river level are severely threatened. Gardner Denver is one such company. Flood walls erected after the 1993 level protect much of the plant but there are still some areas where flood protection only goes to 30 feet, two feet shy of the river stage expected this coming Wednesday or Thursday. This means sandbags have to fill the gap.
The Governor of Illinois visited Quincy on Friday and Quincy's mayor has turned the parking lot of Quincy's convention center into a city wide sandbagging operation. Over 600 residents worked 14 hours the first day and produced 60,000 sandbags for use at the area's trouble spots.
Gardner Denver has asked area resident's to come down on Saturday to continue fill bags at the plant. This will bring some welcome help for employees.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

how is sandbagging going at
GD. Do you feel confident it will work?