Flooding: What's Omaha Dealing With? And What's Ahead?

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Jim, good morning. It's goodto have you on. I appreciate you
taking the time. Good morning,Gary, there you are. Last I
heard this was as of yesterday afternoon. We were expecting a thirty five point
one foot crest probably tomorrow morning,and then we get this round of storms
last night as the calculation changed atall. We haven't heard anything new from

(00:23):
the National Weather Service. We'll getan uptaates updates sometimes this morning. Those
rains that hit us, that's mostlygoing to impact areas south of US,
right as we heard from Terry andthe news of the National Weather Service there.
So what is the situation? Theworst you're expecting for Omaha and the
Metro, you know, it's pressingaround thirty five that's about a foot below

(00:48):
where we were at twenty eleven.So we're ready for what's coming at us.
The levees in good shape. We'rewalking that with the corp of engineers
every day. So the worst we'reexpecting is, uh, we expect the
levee to hold those areas outside thelevee like Dodge Park that that that's going
to be the problematic areas. Yeah, the Nby Dodge Parks has been closed

(01:14):
on the Marina and the Freedom ParkPersian Drive north of six eighty closed right,
Yeah, and then with the rainslast night, we had to close
off the localized roads temporarily. Youknow what happens here when the river comes
up. Our problem now is we'vegot to try to get the water out
when it rains, and we experiencedsome problems with that last night. Yeah,

(01:38):
for sure, it has no ithas nowhere to go. Yeah,
it's a big bowl behind the behindthe levee when it rains. Yeah,
what are you doing relative to Iguess what I'm curious about, and I'm
sure a lot of omahons are too, uh, regarding personnel and preparations for

(02:00):
what is to come? Do youhave to put extra people on? Is
there a bit sandbagging potentially or what? You know? We've we've got over
a thousand sandbags ready to go andbe deployed if we need them somewhere.
We're moving people from eight our shiftsto twelve hour shifts and work in twenty
four hours. So we've we've gotpersonnel ready to go, we've got sandbags

(02:22):
ready to go. We've got thewastewater treatment plant protected with extra protection down
there, so we've got into thatoperational mode we need to be for this
flood. We've had experienced in twentyeleven and twenty nineteen, so we've learned
a lot and we're ready to go. Yeah, this could change, I
assume depending on what happens upstream,right, we all, Yeah, we

(02:44):
always have to look at the forecastand then if the brains upstream change things,
it could last longer, it couldget higher. But you know that's
why we work with a National WeatherService every day on their forecast to prepare
and modifier operations if we need to. Yeah, and we don't have I
was glad to hear you say thatthe water treatment plan has been secured.

(03:08):
Power systems will be okay, right, Yeah, you know last night's storm.
We're still assessing if there's any thingswe are dealing with. We know,
the privates to dealing with a lotof issues with the power outage.
We're assessing and making sure that wehave power to all of our operations right

(03:30):
now. Very good, Jim,thanks appreciate it this morning. Thank you,
Garry. Glad glad you could comeon with us for a little while
on Jim Busy guy. Jim Tylerfrom AMA Public worksp OPBD working feverishly on
this. They've restored about five thousandssince we came on the air this morning.

(03:53):
Total for Douglas County now customers withoutpower almost still ten thousand, but
under ten thousand now and the totalfor the LPBD footprint and nineteen so about
five thousand have been restored in thelast couple of hours. Your input on
what you've seen, what you've beendealing with, we'd appreciate. At studio

(04:15):
at kfab dot com. Got apicture sent in of a lot of leaves
were shredded in the hail zone lastnight. Pictures sent in of a rabbit
having a shredded leaf salad from thatand the power restoration is the big effort
this morning, and then obviously thecleanup because some of the areas saw major
wind damage in terms of limbs comingdown. One of the things that you

(04:39):
don't often think of when you havethis kind of saturation along the river banks
and the streams. A lot ofthose trees we've seen it before, would
topple just because the ground being compromisedin the root system. So see a
lot of fun this spring and summer. I hope you're doing okay,