Eminence, Missouri- Park staff at Ozark National Scenic Riverways have cleared hundreds of trees from park roads and opened pathways for people to travel in the Shannon, Dent, and Texas counties.

At approximately 9:00 AM on Friday, May 8, 2009, the area was struck by a severe storm, with winds gusting 70 to 90 mph, and driving rain which tore down thousands of trees throughout the park. By 9:15 AM, park staff were out clearing roads, using chainsaws and whatever heavy equipment was needed to ensure the safety of the park staff and visitors.

Through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the local counties, the park staff cleared emergency lanes on state highways, county highways, and park roads, in order to gain access into the park areas. All major park points on the river were accessed by Saturday evening, which was the end of the second day of searching. The park staff worked in conjunction with the Missouri Department of Conservation, the Missouri Department of Transportation, and the local road authorities. The park also assisted the community of Eminence, which had major damage and no power, by using NPS generators to keep their Sheriff’s Office and Dispatch Center open, and their radio repeaters working while the county generator was repaired and power lines replaced.

There were no immediate injuries but multiple park visitors and local residents needed to be located and rescued. Due to the amount of area to be searched and roads cleared of downed trees, the park operated under the Incident Command System (ICS) with the Chief Ranger serving as Incident Commander. All park visitors and local residents have been contacted and evacuated but there will be weeks of park wide clean-up of the downed trees and power lines.

Jeff Fulk, pastor of Shannondale Community Church at Timber, reports being out of electric for several days now, with damage sustained to the camp showerhouse, the camp van, and the basketball court. He also reports significant wind damage in Salem. Most regional electrical outages are in rural areas where restoration will be slow.

Jim Barlow reports that his daughter, who lives in Fredericktown, was at work Friday when “the roof came off”. She was unhurt, but shaken up, according her dad. He headed down there Sunday to help with the cleanup.

A report Sunday from Eleanor Hines, a resident of the Baptist Home in Ironton, and long time family friend, said that facility was running on generator power only, and that large branches were down everywhere.

Tara Flynn, naturalist at Onondaga Cave State Park, reported that the campground was under 8 feet of water on Sunday, but the park did not sustain a lot of wind damage. Rain amounts over the region ranged from a three-quarters inch in 24 hours with high winds over the high Ozarks, with amounts up to 3 inches both to the south along the Arkansas border and Bootheel, and in a band across the state between I-70 and I-44 along the Ozark border counties. We received 1.75 inches here on my deck in Pacific, Franklin County.

With already high levels on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers (all the Missouri wing dikes between Jefferson City and St. Charles were submerged on Thursday, and that was before the rain) the lower Meramec River is over flood stage from the Mississippi upstream to Eureka, with roads in the low-lying areas flooded. With no more rain, the Meramec is expected to crest on Tuesday, but more rain is expected here Wednesday.

We’re sure many of our neighbors across Traveler Country are in the same, similar or even worse boats.

A couple was killed near Poplar Bluff, when a tree fell on their Ford Excursion on Rt 53. A couple was lifted into the air for about a hundred feet in Dallas County (Bennett Spring) and the man suffered a fatal heart attack as a result, according to the 5/9 edition of the Southeast Missourian.

Thirteen state parks and historic sites are under full or partial weather closures (presumably for downed trees, although some buildings may have been affected: (check with Castlewood, Elephant Rocks, Dillard Mill, Lake Ozark, Lake Wappapello, Locust Creek Covered Bridge, Onondaga, Prairie, Robertsville, St. Francois, Trail of Tears, Washington or Stockton for the next few days if you have plans to visit. ) It’s likely that other recreational areas in the region have also sustained damage, and that some roads may be impassible.
A call on an unrelated matter to Windy’s Canoe Rental in Eminence on the 8th brought news that the owner was out in town with a chainsaw, helping to re-open some streets. An EF1 tornado (one of three in the area) crossed from Springfield airport, lifting just two miles from Fantastic Caverns, according the Springfield News-Leader, and the Fellows Lake Marina was severely damaged. The Fair Grove and Glendale (Springfield) high schools lost portions of roofs, but no one was severely injured.

We will likely get more reports from Traveler Country… check back later.

In the central United States, Randel Cox of the Center for Earthquake Research and Information (CERI) at University of Memphis, and John Baldwin and Robert Givler of William Lettis and Associates, will study seismic hazards from poorly understood faults located near the famed New Madrid Seismic Zone that produced three large earthquakes in 1811 and 1812. Chris Cramer, also of CERI, will analyze the accuracy of ground motion calculations, contributing to an urban hazard mapping project in St. Louis.

Research along the New Madrid is in flux. Academics at Northern Illinois University and Purdue University claim that the fault is dying, and the machine-noticeable shakes generated once every two to three days are the last gasps of the fault. Researchers within the fault zone aren’t so sure. Quakes large enough to be felt by the public happen two or three times a year, but there are no human scientific records of fault activity patterns prior to the 1811-12  approximately magnitude 8 or Halloween, 1895 Charleston, MO magnitude 6 earthquakes. Two other major quakes are known since the year 1000 AD which have left their geological mark.The relationship of the New Madrid zone to the Wabash Valley Fault System at Mt. Carmel, Ill., which generated a magnitude 5 earthquake last year on April 18, 2008, is unknown.

On a recent whirlwind 36-hour trip to Memphis, it rained pretty solid the entire time.

Because of the nature of the trip, we didn’t leave the 4-lane. I-55 took us along the eastern Missouri border and into the flatlands of the Little Delta.

A lead-heavy sky dogged us…in the far distance, the sky and the coffee-grounds brown plowed fields met in fog.  Water between the furrows flashed in steel pinstripes perpendicular to the road as we rolled by. St. John’s Bayou and other unnamed drainage ditches flowed with broken stirrer sticks in the muddy, milk-coffee water.

It was a great weekend if you were a rice plant.
What stood out this trip were trees. Trees in the Bootheel always seem somehow out of place, though this shouldn’t be so. Back when the land was bottomland wet marsh, before it was logged, trees ruled the place. One might even say trees were king back then, long before cotton, and way before soybeans.

Now, only a few remain on the open, agricultural plain. A handful, twisted in the wind, stand sentinel around most houses. Fencerows and swales hold others; and some stand like guard soldiers along the wet ditches.

What made these trees, whose slight shade barely dents the August fury of the Missouri sun, especially pitiful was damage most sustained during the late January ice storm.

The oaks, the cypresses, the cottonwoods, the sycamores—hardly a tree stood without a blasted crown or hanging dead limbs. Some roadside trees had been pruned into little more than trunk and branch. A chartreuse cloud enveloped at least part of those still standing – and plenty whose grip on the ground was more tenuous.

The gnarly trees, blasted branches, and deadwood still upright mixed with brown and gray water everywhere in the intermittent fog raised the ghost of the vanished swamps. Then the sharp cry of a pileated woodpecker split the air above the road noise– and the shivers which went to stars at the base of my brain weren’t entirely from the chilly day.

It didn’t take long to figure out. In the tradition of St. Joe and Route 66 State Parks, it’s another environmental mess handed to the state to turn into a natural playground. The tip-off was the concrete bunker-like structures rising among the campsites and the various odd-shaped lakes.The state park brochure accentuates the positive: “The 1,050-acre park that features six lakes and a rare sand prairie was created through a unique series of events involving both nature and man.”

To summarize, ice age glaciers left huge amounts of gravelly rock, that were used beginning in 1924 to build more than 23,000 miles of Missouri secondary highways. Once the gravel deposits were mined out, the state highway commission deeded 273 acres to the Missouri State Park Board in 1960. The DNR added 777 acres from Central Stone Co. in 1992.

The lakes look fishy — in a good way. They are stocked with largemouth bass, crappie, bluegill and catfish. As you might expect along the Mississippi, the lakes are a waterfowl magnet, attracting Canada geese, snow geese, mallards, lesser scaups, norther shovelers, great blue herons, snowy egrets and other kinds of ducks and gulls.

Flora lovers can find sand-loving plants like sandgrass, sand dropseed and prairie sunflower.

There are 79 campsites, handy to the nearby casino, and the state park system’s largest swmming beach on Wakonda Lake.

(JS Comment: Whatever you think of the Recovery Act, it’s good to see that some of the recovery money is going to fish, forests, wildlife, parks and federal cleanup projects in more rural areas, and not all of it is staying in the big city.)