Pend Oreille River Flood Alert Sounded Property Owners Invited To Preparedness Meeting

Some of the 1,200 Pend Oreille River property owners may need hip waders in their living rooms when a near-record runoff passes through the river in late May or early June.

They’ve all been invited to a “Flood ‘97 Preparedness” meeting Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Cusick High School. Local and federal officials will be on hand to answer questions and give advice.

“We don’t want to panic anybody, but we want to make them aware,” said JoAnn Boggs, Pend Oreille County emergency services director. “The good thing is that we have time to prepare.”

It takes awhile for the water to arrive because the Pend Oreille River drains much of western Montana - 24,000 square miles, starting at the Continental Divide near Butte.

Boggs said federal experts are predicting this year’s runoff will be 146 percent of normal, compared to the 124 percent last year that flooded about two dozen homes.

Docks on Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho also may be damaged if the lake level rises 8 feet from its current level, as expected, to an elevation of 2,063 feet. The lake hasn’t been above that level since 1981, but officials say it could go as high as 2,065 feet this year.

“It would do a lot of damage around the lake because of all those docks,” said Patrick McGrane, a hydraulic engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers in Seattle. “A lot of them would be under water, and I think a lot of them would just break apart.”

But McGrane said it is unlikely there will be a repetition of the sudden thaw in 1948 that sent the lake to 2,071.8 feet and flooded most of the city of Cusick. He said “1948 had a very similar runoff forecast to this year in terms of volume, but the twist is it all came off very suddenly.”

Construction of Hungry Horse Dam in the early 1950s is one reason such a flood is only a “remote possibility” this year, McGrane said.

The dam on the Flathead River near Glacier National Park can store up to 3 million acre-feet that otherwise would flow into the Pend Oreille River.

Still, the dam can hold back only one-seventh of this year’s predicted runoff - probably not enough to prevent some flooding, McGrane said.

Most other dams in the Pend Oreille River’s drainage are of little use for flood control because they have no significant storage capacity. Such “run-of-the-river” dams include Albeni Falls just upstream from Newport and Box Canyon, between Ione and Metaline.

Anyone whose home was flooded or nearly flooded last year should be making plans to move furniture and other valuables, Boggs said.

She said a survey last year showed “a lot” of additional properties that would have been flooded if the Pend Oreille River had risen 2 to 10 feet from its peak elevation of 2,043.9 feet at Cusick on June 16.

Officials are bracing for a possible crest of 2,050 feet this year, about 5 feet below the 1948 level but still 8 feet above flood stage.

Most of last year’s flood damage was in the Dalkena area, about halfway between Newport and Cusick, and in the River Bend area about 2-1/2 miles north of Usk in the central part of the county.

Depending on where their property is, Boggs said some people may still have time to acquire federal flood insurance. Coverage doesn’t take effect until 30 days after a policy is written. For information, homeowners should contact their regular insurance agents, Boggs said.

Information on river conditions may be obtained by calling the county Emergency Services Department at (509) 447-3731, or the Pend Oreille County Public Utility District at (509) 447-3137. People can also visit the utility district’s Internet home page at www.popud.com

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