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Corps Starts Repairs on Cairo Levee

By Emily Finnegan

CAIRO - Two repair projects are underway on the Mississippi River levee in Alexander County, designed to help protect Cairo from future flooding.

Historic flooding this spring created a crisis in Cairo, putting its levees under great pressure as they worked to hold back high water from the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers; the town was even evacuated because of the threat. Now, the Army Corps of Engineers is working to fix problems the major problem that bubbled up this spring--water getting under the levees...

"They are much-needed and they are going to provide a lot higher level of protection to the area, to the residents," explained County Engineer Jeff Denny.

The underseepage, as it's called, can be incredibly destructive, to the levee and to the infrastructure on the other side.

"They've got a real bad seepage problem," said Mark Broughton with the Army Corps of Engineers.

"I mean, that's one of your main failure mechanisms for a levee is uncontrolled underseepage," said Denny.

This spring, intense pressure from the swollen Ohio and Mississippi Rivers forced water underneath the berms, creating sand boils in the streets of Cairo. Concerns about the levee and the flood risk eventually forced the city to evacuate.

"They're extremely, extremely serious issues that need attention," Denny told News Three.

This week the Army Corps of Engineers started marking land for relief wells and a slurry ditch along the Mississippi River.

"The slurry trench basically stops seepage," Broughton said, "The relief wells controls the flow."

The Corps is attacking the underseepage issue from both the Ohio and Mississippi River sides. They recently finished work on a slurry ditch here along the Ohio River.

Those trenches, located on the river side of the levee, are three feet wide and up to 90 feet deep. The pits are reinforced with a clay mixture before being filled in with dirt to form a water-tight seal. On the land side, relief wells use a screen to prevent material from inside the levee from eroding away.

They're repairs that leaders insist will go a long way toward keeping Cairo safe down the road.

"The next major flood we won't even be having that conversation," said Denny.

Both of those repairs should be finished next fall, at a total cost of a $ 6.6 million.