Marsha, Bill Adams Flee From Raging Flood

May 31, 2011

Details were sketchy but word had been received that Marsha and Bill Adams are safe as raging flood waters bear down on their home along the Missouri River at Dakota Dunes, South Dakota.

Following weeks of pounding rains that promise to make 2011 among the wettest years in the historical record, some 2500 people are under evacuation orders in the expectation that up to 1100 homes will be flooded as the longest river in North America reaches 1000 feet over its banks, according to news data gathered in NY by cousin Diana Monaco.

Marsha's mother, Maxine Fieg Whiteside, who lives with husband Dr. Robert Whiteside across the river in Sioux City, IA, was in the process of gathering supplies to sustain the embattled couple, whom we presume will stay at the family homestead in the immediate future and perhaps indefinitely. 

The Whitesides' home is on higher ground and, we hope, out of danger but there is no guarantee.  Residents on the Iowa side of the river are expecting the confluences of the Big Sioux River, the Little Sioux River, the Floyd River, Perry Creek and other tributaries to back up into those secondary channels as the water rises.

Hamilton Blvd., a four-lane arterial accessing the Whitesides' home, is expected to be inundated.  The only questions are how deep and how far?

With even more rain in the forecast US Army Corps of Engineers and other government officials have warned residents to expect the worst.

To ease overflowing capacity and pressure on upstream reservoirs and dams, regulators are releasing an additional 10,000 cubic feet of water per second per day into the already choked channel.  By comparison, that is the equivalent of the minimum daily flow of the Susquehanna River at its headwaters near Council Rock at the base of Otsego Lake in Cooperstown, NY.

The releases will be increased an additional 10,000 cu. ft. per second per day each day through the month of June until an additional 140,000 cubic feet per second will be sent downstream.

Omaha, 90 miles to the south, where Max Fieg and his mother Therese reside, is expected to see the river crest in about three weeks.  We await further details from Sioux City and Omaha.

Flooding is nothing new in Sioux City but this is a first for Dakota Dunes, a bedroom community of premium homes overlooking the normally broad, languid-looking but deceptively powerful river.  Homes farther from the river are valued at a minimum of a quarter of a million dollars, while homes on the river banks sell for well over a million dollars.  None has ever been flooded.

At last report water was nearly waist-deep on the 18th green at the plush Dakota Dunes Country Club golf course.