Flooding in Big Horn County

Posted 2/23/17

“It might be one of those 100-year deals,” Ernie Marsh said Wednesday. “No one remembers a flood like this right here,” off Spence Oil Road between Greybull and Lovell. “Even the county sheriff doesn’t remember (a flood) here.”

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Flooding in Big Horn County

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Ice jam causes flooding in unexpected places between Greybull/Lovell

Fifteen minutes. That’s all the time Ernie and Teresa Marsh had Tuesday to get themselves and their vehicles out of the path of a flood that no one expected to ever happen near their Big Horn County home.

“It might be one of those 100-year deals,” Ernie Marsh said Wednesday. “No one remembers a flood like this right here,” off Spence Oil Road between Greybull and Lovell. “Even the county sheriff doesn’t remember (a flood) here.”

Ice jams in the Big Horn River have caused repeated flooding before in other areas — Worland, Manderson and Greybull, for example. But the Marshes’ property sits near a straight section of the river.

“It’s kind of odd that (ice) would pile up here,” Marsh said.

But pile up it did, and once that happened, the Marshes went into action to get into their vehicles and move them to higher ground, out of the way of the fast-approaching floodwater.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to salvage much from their mobile home or from the shop where Ernie Marsh does silversmithing.

Later, they moved their horses to higher ground.

“The horses weren’t wanting to leave on their own yesterday, so we had to wade out there to move them,” Marsh said.

Larry and Dianne Ostermiller of Powell own a cabin on neighboring property.

Larry Ostermiller got a call from the local rural electric association Tuesday telling him that workers were going to shut off power to the cabin, because it had flooded.

“We were just flabbergasted,” Dianne Ostermiller said. “We felt like there was no danger.”

A 4-foot dike ran around their property, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency didn’t have the property listed on a flood plain, Larry Ostermiller said.

When the ice jammed, “the dike held everything out except for in one spot, where a bunch of mice had holes burrowed in the dike,” he said. “Cats were digging them out over time, and the water found a weak spot and washed it right out.”

Larry Ostermiller got a call Tuesday evening from Marsh, who asked if he knew anyone who had a boat he could use to get things out of his mobile home, as he wasn’t sure it would still be standing Wednesday morning.

Ostermiller borrowed a flat-bottomed rowboat from a friend and drove it down to the Marshes’ property. They used the boat to make several trips, shuttling valuables and irreplaceable family belongings from the home — family photos, marriage certificates, etc. — to higher ground.

Marsh resumed those efforts the next morning, when he saw the mobile home was still standing.

“The house is still there, and my shop building where I work on stuff,” he said.

The rowboat came in “real handy,” Marsh said, adding with some astonishment, “I’m not often wading in a rowboat in the middle of a desert.”

He said the floodwater contains a lot of unidentifiable debris of different colors, probably from previous flooding upriver.

“There’s a lot of people in Worland that had this happen earlier,” he said.

Another neighbor couple is spending the winter in Arizona, so Marsh said he checked out their property and gave them a report. That house stands a little higher, so it’s barely out of the water, but other buildings on the property were flooded. Ostermiller said the couple had a brand new Jeep Cherokee parked in one of their shops.

Now, it’s pretty much a waiting game.

“We’re not sure if this is going to go up or down,” Marsh said early Wednesday afternoon. “It seems like it’s fluctuated a little bit; the water was down about 6 inches, but now it looks like it’s kind of on the rise again.”

“All I can do is just wait and see what happens and clean up the mess later,” he said. “This is my first flood, so I’m kind of a newbie.”

Neither the Ostermillers nor the Marshes had flood insurance. Until Tuesday, it didn’t seem necessary.

“Ours is not a great situation,” Dianne Ostermiller said. “We’re going to lose a lot financially.”

The Marshes, meanwhile, have lost their home and their business.

Still, Marsh said it could have been much worse.

“We’ve got all our horses, our family’s good, the dogs and cats are OK, so we’re feeling pretty blessed about that,” he said.

Marsh said he and his wife are staying with their son in Byron.

“We’re feeling pretty lucky,” he said. “It happened in the daylight when we could see it coming and we were able to get out of the way.”

Four different ice jams caused trouble along the Big Horn River on Tuesday, with reports of some properties flooding in Manderson, Basin and the rural areas between Greybull and Lovell.

“The ice jams are moving along the river in Big Horn County, causing old ice jams to break and move and forming new ice jams as it goes,” Big Horn County Emergency Management Coordinator LaRae Dobbs said in a Tuesday Facebook post.

Dobbs said the ice jam between Greybull and Lovell was particularly large.

“Our pre-flood efforts are in place, and the river is being monitored on a continuum. This is the hard part, where we watch and wait,” she wrote, adding, “If you live along the Big Horn/Greybull river, please take precautions. Move your animals away from the river, and make preparations for your family to evacuate if you are flooded.”

Runoff water reached high levels over the weekend in Manderson at the confluence of the Nowood and Big Horn rivers. Ice from the Nowood River jammed just above Manderson, before it flows into the Big Horn.

“The jam pushed out Monday, and water levels are dropping,” Pete Hallsten, district engineer for the Wyoming Department of Transportation, said Wednesday. “The town never got wet, but the water came up into the U.S. 16/20 highway right-of-way. The water was still 2 to 3 feet below the roadway.”

The ice jam, which flooded parts of the Worland area last week, remained a couple miles above Manderson on Tuesday.

WYDOT said its maintenance crews continue to provide support in flood mitigation efforts near Worland, Manderson and Greybull.

Those efforts include transporting and placing concrete barriers, providing sand for sandbagging operations, transporting and placing filled sandbags, closing roads when necessary for safety, inspecting bridges and advising officials on flood control efforts.

If the jam hadn’t reached Manderson Wednesday or Thursday, “it may be a while, as the weather is forecast to cool down through the rest of the week,” Hallsten said. “A good snowstorm is being forecast, with dropping temperatures.”

Big Horn River flows through Worland, Manderson and Greybull were high but within the river channel Wednesday.

“Frost is leaving the ground, so runoff water is being absorbed into the ground,” Hallsten said. “So even as the melting picks up, the runoff is subsiding. Most of the low-lying snow is melted throughout the Big Horn Basin.”

He said WYDOT’s main concern remains how the ice might impact area towns and river crossings associated with bridges.

“From what it currently looks like, we are in a waiting game to see what happens,” said WYDOT District Maintenance Engineer Lyle Lamb of Basin. “We will continue to support communities along the Big Horn River.”

Wyoming National Guard troops were demobilized from the area on Saturday.

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