Last Wednesday morning Mike & I were sandbagging. Our friend Jackie lives on South River Road. With the river crest expecting to come over the weekend, there was a big push in these neighborhoods to raise their backyard dikes with sandbags. City crews had worked long into the night on Tuesday dropping off pallets of sandbags. My pictures will show pallets of sandbags in the street. At 9 am a labor force of at least 2 busloads of students from Shanley High School were dropped off. Those kids were really great pitching in to help out people they didn’t even know. It only took a couple of hours to sandbag the area behind Jackie’s house and 2 of her neighbors. After laboring several days to sandbag during last year’s flood this just seemed too easy. The city was raising the dikes only 2 feet in this area–to meet a level of 41 feet whereas last year it was raised to 45 feet (if I remember correctly).
Mike was wearing a yellow rain slicker and must have looked official. He talked to both a local newspaper reporter and a national TV producer. The next day our names were mentioned in the paper and, don’t blink you’ll miss us, we were briefly on the CBS Morning Show. Not quite 15 minutes of fame–more like 10 seconds.
Here are sandbagging pictures. Click on any picture for a full size view.