Carter Lake by John Schreier

Author:John Schreier [Schreier, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, Midwest (IA; IL; IN; KS; MI; MN; MO; ND; NE; OH; SD; WI), Photography, Subjects & Themes, Regional, Travel, Pictorials
ISBN: 9781467118583
Google: KwVuDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2017-01-30T15:55:23+00:00

About 250 families evacuated their homes in East Omaha, Nebraska, before a dike broke north of their area during the 1943 flood. From the Des Moines Register.

Although the desperate work of an estimated 2,300 soldiers and civilian workers at first appeared to have “won their battle upstream from Council Bluffs, Ia., and Omaha,” the flood crest of 22.5 feet and gushing water from a sand boil that formed on the dry side of the levee forced the workers to make a hasty evacuation. (The National Weather Service reports the 1881 flood crest at Omaha as 34.22 feet, as measured under the former Ak-Sar-Ben Bridge linking Omaha and Council Bluffs, now both Interstate 480 and U.S. Highway 6, making it the third-highest ever reported.)200

The article in the Des Moines Register reported that East Omaha saw 250 homes evacuated within hours of river breaching the levee. Nearby, an estimated one thousand people were forced from their homes in the Carter Lake area, as a new levee on Locust Street failed against the water, joined by one just to the southwest along the industrial district on Omaha’s Grace Street. The Missouri River found its way back to the dry lakebed of the former Lake Florence to the north of the town “and inundated the airport with seven feet of water in 18 hours”—and Carter Lake was directly in its path.201 But the Iowa city on the Nebraska side of the river suffered one of the hardest hits of any community during the 1943 flood. Many residents believed officials chose to save the rail yards at the expense of Carter Lake. As Simpson wrote:

This levee was destroyed by the Corps of Engineers during the spring flood of 1943 to save the Omaha railroad yards, power plant, and the low-lying sections of the Omaha business district. The community of Carter Lake was flooded resulting in severe damage to homes and property. At the time many of the residents, especially in the Carter Lake Club area, were deeply resentful of the actions of the army engineers. This hostility was directed at the mayor of Carter Lake who, they believed, could have prevented the action with a protest.202

With the destruction to Carter Lake as no doubt at least a small factor, the flood of 1943 was the inspiration for the dam system that currently serves as a portion of the Missouri River’s flood control in the Dakotas. In December 1944, Congress approved the Flood Control Act, which included the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program, the first effort at a “complex water control plan along the entire Missouri River Basin” and created the existing structure of dams and man-made lakes.203 The last of these, Gavins Point Dam, is roughly 150 miles upriver from Carter Lake.

Drowned but not dead following the worst flood in more than sixty years, Carter Lake would again return and rebuild, as it always had. But Carter Lake residents would again be forced to evacuate by the highest crest the Missouri River has ever produced in Omaha less than a decade later.

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