Woodbury Bulletin

But officials said last week those plans don’t include piling sandbags atop the levee, a measure that prevented floodwaters from spilling over the dike in 2001, the last spring that major flooding occurred on the upper Mississippi River.

Rather, the city will protect only a pair of sanitary sewer lift stations that sit in the floodplain to prevent river water from inundating Newport’s sewer system.

The reason? City Administrator Brian Anderson said the city cannot risk the liability of mustering volunteers on the levee that sits on private riverfront property, a policy established in 2004.

“The decision was made that the city was not going to protect private property,” Anderson said during a council workshop last week. It was deemed “too unsafe to put people out on the levee.”

It’s a judgment, though, that leaves some 40 homes sitting in the floodplain in the lurch.

The National Weather Service forecasted “moderate-to-severe” flooding in its latest outlook. A high volume of snow and ice melt from the Mississippi River is expected to raise Mississippi River levels, said Diane Cooper, a hydrologist with the weather service in Chanhassen.

“No more precipitation from now ‘til the end of April, basically,” is how the river can avoid significant flooding this spring, she said.

Experts are predicting a 7 percent chance of floodwaters reaching the catastrophic levels of the 1965 flood, Cooper said. That epic flood left Cedar Lane in Newport submerged and the first floors of some 40 homes flooded, according to M. Virginia Yelland’s history of Newport, “The Unique Legacy of Red Rock & Newport Minnesota 1837-1989.”

‘Now you’re on your own’

It was that event that led a group of Newport residents to construct the makeshift 800-foot-long levee along Cedar Lane. Since then, the levee has been built and planted upon, weakening the berm that city and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials say was not constructed to any engineering standards.

The levee — actually a pair of levees, separated by a small river inlet — are “not in ideal condition,” said Terry Zien, an Army Corps of Engineers project manager who has studied the Newport dike.

“There’s some concern about (the levies),” Zien said. “I wouldn’t say they’re in any kind of eminent danger of failure, but they’re not ideal, either. They require a certain amount of vigilance.”

He added: “There’s risk with any levee, so you just have to understand that.”

Steve Svoboda recognizes that danger. He has lived in his Cedar Lane home since 1992, his back yard a riverbank that slopes down to a Mississippi River armlet.

He said last Sunday he has seen floodwaters in 1997 and 2001 lap at the top of the sandbagged levee beside his house.

‘Decision inconceivable’

But both Svoboda and neighbor Bruce Bilderback, who grew up on Third Avenue near the river, said the city’s decision not to sandbag the levee is inconceivable.

“I don’t think the city should’ve just said, ‘OK, now you’re on your own,’” Svoboda said. “All these other cities along the river sandbag, but not Newport?”

Bilderback put it more bluntly.

“If you can try to save somebody,” he said, “you’d be stupid not to.”

City officials, however, aren’t convinced that sandbagging would do any good. In 2001, river water poured through the weakest 300-foot section of the levee, not over its top, said Bruce Hanson, the city’s public works director.

Newport spent $170,000 fighting that flood and cleaning up after it, and gathered some 1,000 volunteers to build a sandbag dike. This time, Hanson said, he isn’t sure the old levee can hold up, sandbags or not.

“It’s really hard when you see the water’s coming up and people’s houses are in jeopardy,” said Newport city council member Pauline Schottmuller at a meeting last week. “But we really can’t do anything.”

‘You’re kind of at its mercy’

Newport native Bilderback said, though, he isn’t concerned about a spring flood of 2010 yet. In 2001, he said, he was moved out of his home that sits a few hundred feet from the levee, holed up in a hotel room and in contact with the Red Cross in expectation his neighborhood would be under water with the river just inches from topping the levee before it crested.

Now, “I’m just not worried,” Bilderback said. “It’s a little too early to worry.”

Cooper, of the National Weather Service, said though conditions in the Twin Cities don’t lend themselves to significant flooding, it’s a different story upstream.

That leaves riverfront homeowners like Svoboda feeling vulnerable. It’s worth the headaches of spring flooding, he says, for the lifestyle that comes with having the Mississippi River within a stones throw of his back deck.

But, yet: “You’re kind of at its mercy,” Svoboda said. “The river’s going to go where it wants.”

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