(Spirit Lake)– Putting together a contingency plan to protect Dickinson county in the event flooding appears imminent before any work at the Lower Gar Outlet can be completed isn’t going to happen overnight. That’s the message Mike Ehret, Dickinson County Emergency Management Coordinator, had Tuesday for the Dickinson county board of supervisors.
Instead, Ehret told the supervisors the process will take months if it’s to be done correctly. He says it would involve three stages: research into the conditions that led to the 1993 flood; gathering information from various groups, associations, governmental entities and others affected by the 1993 flood; and the third, actually writing the plan.
Phil Petersen of the Okoboji Protective Association suggested last week the county devise such a plan. But he cautioned that it be a preventive plan, not a reactive one. Adding he feels the county should proceed immediately with recommendations spelled out in previous reports from the U.S Army Corps of Engineers.
But supervisor Mardi Allen says she feels even though the plan is being put together prior to any meeting with the DNR and Corps of Engineers, that it’s still part of a logical sequence of events and that it could be revised based on information garnered from such a meeting.
A date for a joint meeting with those entities hasn’t been set yet.
