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Janesville considers future flood preparation

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JANESVILLE — Good news for Janesville: A river runs through it.

Bad news for Janesville: A river runs through it.

The Rock River could be an asset to the city, a parade of consultants has said. But this year’s flooding showed the Rock’s dark side.

The flood was just an inconvenience for most people, but floodwaters were higher than any time in the history of recording Rock River levels. Homes and businesses flooded. Five blocks on the river side of Main Street were without power for days.

All of which begs the question: Should the city prepare for another big flood?

The question will be on the minds of city leaders in the months ahead as they consider the wisdom of:

-- Investing a lot of money to improve the shorelines or to move homes and businesses out of the floodplain.

-- Doing the best it can with what it has to shore up shoreline defenses, knowing it might not be enough.

-- Fixing any flood damage and leave things as they are, on the chance that 2008 was an aberration unlikely to happen again for decades.

One thing that won’t help is to raise the river walls that protect downtown Janesville, said Jack Messer, city director of public works.

Messer noted that areas such as the Hedberg Public Library parking lot flooded before the water went over the wall.

The water came up through the storm sewers, Messer said, and building a higher wall wouldn’t change that.

In fact, a higher wall could trap water and keep it from flowing back into the river.

“It seems like a simple answer—just raise the wall—but that is not a simple solution. It is a very complicated solution,” Messer said.

There are things that can be done, Messer said, although he didn’t want to discuss what those things might be.

“Those are serious policy questions, and probably what we ought to do is wait to discuss them on a community basis,” Messer said.

The community conversation is likely to start with the city council. Messer is preparing materials for the council to consider, maybe as soon as its Monday, July 28, meeting.

Council members will want to know: What are the chances of another big flood?

The main reason for the Great Flood of 2008, scientists have told us, was an awful lot of rain over the entire Rock River watershed upstream of Janesville.

It rained intensely, again and again, over many days.

Could it happen again, or was it a fluke unlikely to be repeated in our lifetimes?

The climate is changing, many if not most climatologists agree. Some have said we should expect wetter wet periods but also drier dry periods, with warmer weather all around.

And history is no guide.

“We’re working at this point in time on about 100 years of data, and 100 years of data in the history of the world is not much,” Messer said.

“This is the biggest (flood) we’ve seen, (but) if you look at the floodplains, the river valleys, clearly there were wider rivers at some point.”

Pinpointing the next flood is impossible, Messer said.

His immediate problem is to assess the damage to the river wall that extends through the downtown, and he can’t do much of that until the water recedes.

Messer said he wants to draw down the river so the base of the walls can be seen and inspected.

But that will have to wait for weeks, as the river remains around 11 feet at the Afton gauge south of the city. That’s still 2 feet above flood stage.

Over the past week, the level has dropped about 6 inches.

HISTORICAL NOTE

Parts of Janesville’s river walls go back at least 75 years, when, records indicate, the city employed men to build a retaining wall on the east side of the river in the downtown as a way to keep people employed during the Great Depression. Walls have been repaired over the years, and sidewalks have been built along segments of the walls.