Brian Rieder, our promo guy here at WREX, and I were talking about the flooded Rock River this afternoon. When he was driving across the Latham Road bridge this afternoon he could see that the water has fallen off quite a bit since it crested late last week. But why isn't it quicker? After all. We haven't had any rainfall for the better part of a week.First let's talk about why it got flooded in the first place. (I'll also explain why there's a giant Coke cup on this blog post). 6-12 inches of rain fell in Central and Southern Wisconsin during the beginning of June. This water pooled in area river basins and flowed toward the Mississippi and Rock Rivers.
It took more than a week for the river to rise to its crest and it will take at least as long to fall below flood stage. The reason why? We've filled the river up beyond capacity but haven't changed the channel width. So now all of this water is going to have to find its place in the channel and flow downstream...and that may take a while. This brings me to the giant coke cup! Whether the cup's full or empty you can only get so much out of the straw on top. That's your channel! And there's no way to get that channel bigger and let the cup drain (unless you rip off the plastic top and dump it out or poke a hole on the bottom but that's no fun).
3 comments:
how hilarious. i was going through my old pictures from ten years ago this past weekend and found the pic I took of this big Coke cup at Disney, and thought to myself, that was huge! The coke cup is actually a stairway for the hotel.
I am almost wondering too, even when these rivers finally go down if the flooding in martin park will go down too or if that is something where the water will have to be removed some other way.
Funny, I just looked at the image closer and the cup's got a thousand holes in it! :P
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