Gophers And Moles

Guard praised as levee duty ends

When it came time for 29 Nebraska National Guard members to “stand down” from their duties monitoring Omaha's levees Sunday, local officials stood up and applauded.

Gordon Andersen of the Omaha Public Works Department said that it's hard to find enough superlatives to cover the job the Guard has done over the past 44 days of Missouri River flooding.

“These men and women have been out in the toughest weather there is — 24 hours a day, seven days a week — sometimes in hip waders and life jackets,” Andersen said. “At times it's been so hot that rainstorms were welcome.”

At noon Sunday the Guard handed over to private contractors the task of checking the city's 13 miles of levees for sand boils, seepage and varmints. Bellevue and other Nebraska cities along the Missouri River also began monitoring their own levees.

Omaha officials had asked Gov. Dave Heineman and his adjutant general to keep Guard members monitoring the city's levees through August. That would have allowed the city to focus its efforts elsewhere and be spared some of the costs of the metropolitan area's flood fight.

But in a letter from the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency, the state said it believed the city was capable of monitoring the levees itself.

“We certainly were disappointed,” said Marty Grate of the city's Public Works Department.

The city estimates it will spend $80,000 in August to monitor the levees with city employees and private contractors. As of mid-July the city had spent $5.4 million to counter flooding.

Andersen said about “700 issues” have been noted by the Guard since it took over levee duties on June 17, including the identification of hundreds of varmint holes.

“Muskrats, moles, pocket gophers . . . any burrowing animals can damage a levee,” Andersen said. “They burrow in near the waterline of the river and that lets water in to weaken the whole levee.”

When an animal hole is found it is filled in and a sandbag is placed on top to keep the rodent out. A red flag is placed next to the hole to let city workers know it is a problem spot.

The guardsmen, from the 170th Air Refueling Wing at Offutt Air Force Base and the 155th Air Refueling Wing in Lincoln, were not made available for interviews.

!#$^# gophers/voles/moles! | Braided Bower Farm

In all seriousness, we don’t begrudge the little fellas the occasional onion or beet; they contribute far more to the garden than they take. Howzat?

Bear with me a moment and I’ll get to it.

Before industrial agriculture and forestry came around, the ground here was thickly covered in rich, fluffy duff. You can still go into the few remaining scraps of old growth forest and easily push your hand a foot or more into the ground to see what it’s like. If it wasn’t so scarce I’d harvest some as the world’s best potting soil, but it’s mostly been destroyed and takes centuries to recover, so I don’t. rain). Eventually, what’s left is orange clay that can support only the most persistent “weeds” and deep-rooted trees. Eventually, the hardy, brushy plants will build a new soil layer, but people don’t live that long.

It’s not that bad on our little patch, because the land has been allowed to recover to some extent, but several inches beneath the surface it’s pretty much pure pottery. This is where the voles and other tunneling creatures are indispensable – their tunnels help the rainwater get down to the river without taking everything else along with it, and they break up the hard clay, mixing in the soil that they move around and of course leaving “fertilizer” in their wake.