Slides, questions in Castle Rock
Wednesday, January 7, 2009 9:51 PM PST
By Cheryll Borgaard
Printable version
E-mail this articlePhone calls flooded Castle Rock City Hall on Wednesday afternoon with questions about a possible evacuation from rising waters.
“If people feel more comfortable moving possessions and maybe staying somewhere else at a higher elevations, we’re certainly not discouraging them from doing that,” City Clerk Ryana Covington said late in the afternoon
As of 5 p.m. Wednesday, there was no call for any evacuation, even though the Weather Service said rising Cowlitz River levels could threaten the town’s dike.
Though officials say that’s unlikely, they were planning to keep a vigil through the night. City Hall would remain open beyond regular business hours to field questions from the public, Covington said.
At the Castle Rock Fairgrounds on Wednesday afternoon, volunteers loaded display cases into a utility trailer as the river was lapping at the nearby road. Two buildings already had water in them, but it was from ground water, not the roiling river. The fairgrounds is on the west, undiked side of the river, though, and could be hit by the rising river.
“There’s no sense in sandbagging,” said a mud-spattered Yvonne Knuth, fair board president, as she helped hoist a cabinet into the trailer. “We didn’t sandbag last time (in ‘96). We’re just moving out what we can.”
Five mud slides on West Side Highway seen Wednesday afternoon between Four Corners in Castle Rock and Lexington, three of them blocking at least part of the roadway. A crane was removing debris from the east side of the Burlington Northern railroad track near the Sparks Drive overpass. Scars from at least three other fresh slides were visible.
bones wrote on Jan 7, 2009 11:17 PM:
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