By: Jessica Cihacek
jcihacek@kcautv.com
Landowners on the tour remember last summer all too well.
Gary Merkwan from Gayville, SD, says, "It was hell! We had a week to prepare. We went down and had an estimate made of how many sandbags we would need and they said 30,000."
Merkwan and his wife, Linda, are still paying for it. Through the amount of land they lost and the amount of sand that still sits idle on their property.
Now, obviously sand is anything but a blessing for homeowners along the Missouri River, but according to National Park Service representatives? That's exactly what it is for wildlife. Endangered species, like the eagle.
Steve Mietz, Superintendent of the NPS, says, "They need flat sandbars where they dig down little holes and put their nests in them."
So while a lot of bad things happened with the flooding, Mietz says a lot of good things happened, too. It made for cleaner water and better fishing.
As for the bad? Mietz thinks a lot of it could have been prevented.
Homes that were washed away might have been spared, he says, had they been built a little further from the river. And trying to control the river from here on out is not the answer.
He adds, "She's still in charge. This is the largest basin in the country. We're draining water from Montana and to think we can control that, that we understand the snowpack is just fooling ourselves. The river is gonna do what the river does."
No matter what the answer, landowners are ready to move on.
And while things are starting to resemble some sort of normalcy, landowners say the only thing that's ever really normal along the Missouri River is change.
