Calhoun County Residents Do Best to Cope with Devastating Floodwaters

HARDIN - The residents of Calhoun County are doing their best to cope with floodwaters as they are receding across the area.

Following the overtop of the Nutwood Levee, residents of Calhoun are now further isolated from the rest of the world. While that overtop created lower crests for Alton and Grafton, it also flooded Route 16, which is the main route from Hardin to Jersey County. Without that road, a trip to Jerseyville from Hardin takes nearly three hours - and that's knowing the shortcuts. This precarious position has left tempers short in

Calhoun, Sheriff Bill Heffington said Monday, but residents are coping with some additional help from state and local agencies.

Heffington said many residents are also braving the flooded Nutwood Bottom Area, which is currently entirely flooded. While this could shorten the trip considerably,

Heffington warned the waters are dangerous.

"We are getting reports of waves 6 feet tall out there in the bottoms," Heffington said.

"We had a commercial fisherman in a 26-foot boat come back after crossing the river over there. The river isn't so bad, but once you get out into the bottoms, everything is flat. It's like the ocean out there and it doesn't take much wind to get those waves rolling."

Getting food and fuel into Calhoun has also been an ordeal. Heffington said officers from his office are offering escorts to large trucks bringing supplies through narrow back roads. He said Irish Hollow, a back road not built for such traffic, has been a difficult road to maneuver for those trucks.

Despite the hard-to-navigate rural roads in various states of condition, Heffington said crashes have been at a minimum. One young man, however, did go airborne into a lake from a back road. Heffington said he wasn't injured, but was facing charges due to the speed of that crash, which Heffington described as "self-inflicted."

Police were also called to investigate what appeared to be theft from the area's food pantry, but that may have been a miscommunication, he said, as the takers of the items have been identified as needy families in the area from surveillance footage.
Heffington said the county also had an emergency involving a woman who lost several toes in a lawnmower incident. She was able to be quickly airlifted to emergency services. It should be noted, Calhoun did not lose a single resident to the flood of 1993.

As for when the waters will recede and give Calhouners a sense of normalcy again, Heffington said a lot of factors would go into determining that, and they would continue to deal with the current circumstances until they changed.

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