By John Carlson
The Des Moines Register
BURLINGTON, Iowa — Law enforcement officers are doing what a week ago would have been unimaginable — shooting hogs on sight as the animals try to climb to safety atop a levee that’s protecting thousands of acres of farmland and dozens of homes north of Burlington.
Des Moines County Sheriff Mike Johnstone said there is no choice.
“They’re crawling up the side of the levee and breaking down the plastic and the sandbags on the top,” said Johnstone. “It is destroying the levee. There’s no way to contain the hogs or round them up, and there’s no way to get them out of the water.”
So sheriff’s deputies are killing them with AR-15 rifles as they appear on the levee.
It probably was inevitable, given where the levee broke at Oakville on Saturday, flooding the town. Several large hog confinement facilities are in the area, and the river rose so fast there was no way to get the animals loaded and to safety before the levee broke.
There were reports of dead hogs floating in Oakville and outside of town. Many — probably hundreds — were swept south of the town by the current.
They’re climbing on a levee that protects a drainage ditch between Oakville and Burlington — referred to around here as the “big ditch” — that is carrying much of the floodwater to the Mississippi River. Thousands more acres will be flooded if that levee breaks, so that’s the reason deputies have the shoot-to-kill order.
Fifteen were “put down” by midafternoon Wednesday.
“We really hate it,” said Johnstone. “But it’s the only thing we can do.”
Iowa National Guard Lt. Col. David May, who is in Burlington coordinating flood-fighting efforts with local officials, said that while the Mississippi River here appears to be cresting and people are beginning to relax a bit, the levee system remains in a “precarious” situation.
“The river is going to stay at record levels for several days, and that puts tremendous pressure on the levees,” said May. “I’m talking about the big ditch and the river levee. It’s a couple of feet of freeboard now (the distance between the water and the top of the levee), but that can come up or the wind can create a wave action that can wear away the levee. And the hogs are a problem. This isn’t over with.”
Much of the Burlington riverfront is under water, and levee breaks across the Mississippi in Illinois have taken some of the pressure off the city and areas up and down the river from here.
“Some people here are having hardships, that’s for sure,” said Burlington Mayor Bill Ell. “But we look at Oakville and Cedar Rapids and Gulfport across the river and we’re keeping things in perspective.”
The Great River Bridge here that links Iowa and Illinois will be closed for — well, nobody knows for sure how long — because Gulfport is under 10 feet of water after the levee broke there Tuesday morning. That means U.S. Highway 34 there might be heavily damaged. The best guess is the bridge will be closed anywhere from two to six weeks.
“This river will be high here until at least August,” said LeRoy Lippert, longtime mayor of Danville and head of the Des Moines County Emergency Management Commission.
“There is so much still to come all the way from Wisconsin and Minnesota. It’s all going to come right through here.”
Volunteers and National Guard soldiers have filled and hauled 2.6 million sandbags in Des Moines County the past six days — about 600,000 of them on Tuesday.
The Guard has been invaluable, Lippert said. Still ...
“There are three ways to do things,” he said. “There’s the right way, the wrong way and the government way. Boy, it takes those people a long to make a decision. We say, ‘Hey, take some sandbags there.’ It takes them a while to get things going. But when they do, they get the job done and get it done right. Just a different way of doing things.”
Lippert, 74, said he’s been at the county emergency operations center seven consecutive days, and it’s time for a short break.
“I’m going to go home and mow hay,” he said. “I have to do something normal.”
Copyright 2008 The Des Moines Register