June 18, 2008 - Burlington, IA Flood

We were just finishing up in Oakville and decided to head out of town, get a decent hotel, and get some laundry done. The team was tired and was looking forward to enjoying a good meal and some rest. Rob went out to do some shopping in the nearest city, which was Burlington. Within an hour my phone rang – it was Rob explaining that there was a building right on the Mississippi River that was underwater, and it looked like they could really use our help. I jumped in my truck and headed down to Burlington.

Within a few minutes of my arrival I met Pete Wilson, the factory manager of LaMont Limited. He explained that the water pump, which was almost 40 years old, caught on fire and the basement of this huge factory has subsequently filled with water, just one inch away from the majority of the inventory on the first floor.

I called the rest of the team to get all the equipment to downtown Burlington and within an hour we had our 1800 gallon-per-minute water pump removing the water from the basement.

But that would not completely solve the problem. The LaMont Limited building was under water – the Mississippi River was surrounding the building with water 3-4 feet high. We could pump the water out of the basement but it would just fill back up as soon as we pumped it out. Our only choice was to sand bag around the building…but can you sand bag a building that is already under water? There was only one way to find ouy: Let’s sand bag it.

It would take a small army to walk sand bags through the water one by one and build this wall to hold back the river. The $310,000 trucks were too expensive to risk putting in the deep water and the only piece of equipment that could drive through 3-4 feet of water with sand bags was our CAT skid steers. I decided to take a chance and send one in with the other one on standby with cables and chains in case the first skid steer stalled from the deep waters.

For the next 10 hours, the First Response Team worked tirelessly with some of the factory workers. While the water pump was pumping, we were building this wall in the hopes that it would work. By 10 pm the wall was built, and we were soaking wet. The water pump was still working and by 6 am the next morning the basement was empty.

Guess what? It worked. The wall was built around the factory and no more water was flooding into the basement. I never thought you could sand bag a wall around a building that was already under water and then pump the building dry but we did it anyway and we saved the inventory of the largest factory in Burlington, IA.

As we were finishing up that morning, I kept my eye on the weather reports. I heard of many communities that were nervous about the raging waters headed south. I knew many of them would not have the budgets nor equipment to help themselves, similar to the situation in Oakville. We loaded the equipment and said goodbye. I was going to make some calls and do some more research about communities along the river when my cell phone suddenly rang.