Flooding in Inkom stabilizes; fields remain filled with water

INKOM — This week’s water that spilled over a bridge and into the small town of Inkom has subsided, but low-lying regions and fields are still flooded.

The bridge on Highway 30 that crosses Rapid Creek is where the town has seen the most flooding, and the water level isn’t fluctuating at night, “as much as it was,” said Mayor Max Shaffer.

The water level in the creek has gone down, but the level of the Portneuf River has stayed the same. On Wednesday night, the water didn’t flow over the bridge, but on Thursday night it did.

On Tuesday, citizens of south Bannock County spent all afternoon stacking sandbags along the bank of the river to protect nearby houses and businesses. Shaffer said that they haven’t had a problem with water flowing through the cracks or over the sandbags since they set them up.

Without the sandbags, the flood area would have been far worse off, he said.

“There’s no doubt that there would have been homes and businesses with substantial damage if we hadn’t contained the water within the sandbags as we did,” Shaffer said.

He added that all they had to do on the sandbags after Tuesday was “shore them up.”

Shaffer said that he was proud of the way people came together and worked with each other.

“The whole community just comes out for support and they just are wanting to help,” he said. “It’s just really encouraging and uplifting to see how they come together.”

Gary Gregston, the owner of the Red Pony, a bar that’s right on the bank of the river, said he’s putting together plans to put on a party this summer for everyone who volunteered their time to sandbag the bridge. He plans on providing more updates on when and where the party will be.

While there’s still a significant amount of snow that needs to melt on the mountains, Shaffer said, “the brown spots are definitely getting bigger. The ridges are starting to get wider, and you can see that a lot of snow has melted.”

Andrew McKaughan, said that cooler temperatures have allowed the flood waters to stabilize, because the snow pack isn’t melting as fast as it was earlier in the week.

While the temperatures are expected to stay cool through the next few days, rain is expected throughout the weekend.

“They’re kind of canceling each other out,” McKaughan said.

He said that the flood waters are expected to stay where they are, “If not maybe rise in a few locations.” McKaughan doesn’t expect the rise to be higher than a foot.

Despite the creek and river water level stabilizing, overflowing groundwater is still filling up low-lying areas around the town.

He explains that overflowing water from the river and creek flows out into the fields and low-lying areas and seeps into the ground and saturates it.

“And the only place left for the water to go is more ground,” Shaffer said.

The city of Inkom Land Application Site, which is where they store sewage water and irrigate the nearby field with it, looks like a lake. Shaffer said it only fills up like that every seven to ten years.

Some parts of the site are five feet deep, but it varies with the slope of the ground, he said.

One property on the south of town has water flowing straight through it, and Shaffer said a local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ward held a youth activity where they sandbagged a path through the property to keep it away from the house.

If the flooding was to get worse at all in the weekend or next week, they would be able to get plenty of sandbags from Bannock County.

“One call to the county and they just do everything they can to help us,” Shaffer said. “So that’s been really encouraging.”