Helicopters fight the risk of floods from ice jams in North Dakota
When ice jams on the Missouri River led to possible flooding, North Dakota tackled the problem with a unique solution.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 There's been a lot of warmth and dry weather across the north central US, but some areas
00:05 are still dealing with winter problems.
00:08 Like in North Dakota, ice jams threaten to flood parts of the capital city of Bismarck.
00:13 But the state officials worked together to find a creative solution.
00:16 Bernie Reyno spoke with North Dakota's Department of Water Resources to find out all about it.
00:24 This has been such a mild winter, but the threat that you were facing with ice in the
00:31 Missouri River has been a big problem.
00:33 Yes, sir, that it has.
00:36 Something that we typically see a little bit of here and there, usually in the spring when
00:43 we have ice break up, and again, sometimes in freezing in the wintertime.
00:47 But yeah, we had a unique situation here a couple weeks ago.
00:50 And I understand you had a unique way to solve the problems.
00:55 You used, how did the idea to use helicopters come about?
00:59 And has that ever done before?
01:01 Was this the first time?
01:04 So the idea with the helicopters here in North Dakota, we collaborate quite readily with
01:09 all levels of government, state, local, city, federal, and that was the case here too.
01:15 And we have emergency flood response situations here.
01:19 We set up an emergency operations center with our local department of emergency services
01:26 that is headed up by Adjutant General Al Dorman, who also oversees the National Guard.
01:30 So we have those folks at our disposal.
01:34 And this situation, we had the ice jam, rivers were rising.
01:38 We were at the emergency operations center, and we just started talking about issues,
01:44 thoughts, ideas.
01:45 And so we came up with this idea of dropping water and using the water from the river to
01:52 fix the river itself.
01:53 And in fact, it turned out to work quite nicely given the conditions that we had.
01:58 We were very pleased with the results.
02:01 Matter of fact, once we got the ice to let loose, in a matter of two hours, the river
02:06 dropped two feet.
02:09 It took some doing.
02:11 The National Guard pilots did an awesome job, and we had a successful destroying of the
02:19 ice jam, so to speak.
02:20 John Peskowski, State Engineer for North Dakota's Department of Water Resources.
02:26 Mr. Peskowski, thank you so much for joining us.
02:28 What a creative idea, and we're glad it worked so well for you.
02:35 Winter is, of course, something that we're talking about here across the Northern Tier
02:40 of the nation, because we just haven't seen much of it.
02:42 You heard about that ice.
02:44 Well, there's not a lot of it in the Northern Tier of the nation as far as the Great Lakes
02:48 are concerned.
02:49 We've been struggling to get the ice coverage at all.
02:52 And in fact, I think we only went into the teens as far as percentage of ice coverage
02:57 on the Great Lakes.
02:58 Now back to 1.3% of ice coverage.
03:01 This is the time of year where we would start to begin to shrink that ice coverage a little