PROTECTING YOUR INVESTMENTS FROM NATURAL DISASTERS
By Suz Trusty
Weather patterns world-wide have been changing, with more “100-year” floods, wide-ranging hurricanes, tornados, typhoons, tsunamis, blizzards, ice storms, and wild fires than in previous years. Abnormal has become the new normal.
Tat means you need to not only take a proactive approach to preparedness, but also to think way out of the box in determining what that means for your business and your employees. What constituted an adequate level of preparedness in the past may not be sufficient for tomorrow’s natural disaster.
Te article, “Protecting Your Investments—Before and After a Disaster,” in the May/June 2018 issue of Turf News provides a good overview of the basics to consider. Building on that requires taking a hard look at the “what ifs” that could, under extraordinary circumstances, impact your business assets and operations.
Consider the Extremes Te extreme weather event, dubbed a “Bomb Cyclone,” swept across the Midwest in mid-March while the ground was still frozen; many areas had experienced no snow melt yet, after a winter of exceptionally heavy snows; and ice on many of the rivers was up to 24-inches thick. It hit as a blizzard with heavy snow and strong winds, followed by warming and heavy rainfall. Dams were topped or destroyed, levees were breached or failed, and rivers reached flood stage heights never seen before.
One of the storm issues that made the national news was the flooding at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, Nebraska. Much of the water that inundated Offutt made its way there through the farm of TPI member Robert Meisinger, owner of Fast Grass in Plattsmouth, NE, just south of Omaha.
Te Platte, Missouri and Elkhorn Rivers all converge in that area. Typically, Meisinger would track the weather reports and watch the river levels, anticipating a warning of a day or two for damage-control preparation.
Tis year, the flooding happened much faster. Te water from the three rivers became one massive river, something that had never happened before. One factor contributing to that was the collapse of the Spencer Dam on the Niobrara River in Northern Nebraska, near the South Dakota border. Te Niobrara River feeds into the Missouri River. Media outlets have now reported that huge chunks of ice—some
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When the water had receded enough, Meisinger and staff could wade to the buildings to assess the damage.
weighing as much as a full-sized pickup—played a leading role in the collapse of that 29-foot-high dam. Te collapse unleased a wall of water 11 to 15 feet in height.
Meisinger says, “If we had gotten word about the Spencer Dam collapsing earlier, we might have been able to anticipate a high level of flooding and would have moved more equipment off the property.” However, in retrospect he felt, with the wide-ranging flooding, areas that might have been considered a safe place for the equipment, even in abnormal circumstances, probably would not have been.
At the height of the flooding, his property was entirely inundated by water. As of April 1, Meisinger reported that he had 290 acres of sod production fields that had been under water anywhere from two to four days, that were now exposed. Most of that flooded area, he thought was, for the most part, in good shape. He still had 210 acres of production fields underwater. Tat includes some ground on the Iowa side of the river, but because the bridges had been washed out by the flooding and alternate routes were not accessible because they were under water, he had not been able to get to them to see the extent of that damage.
TPI Turf News May/June 2019
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