Dear Editor:

Spring is almost over, and with it, the normal rainy season is almost over.

Cassville is very fortunate, because Cassville — known as the City of Seven Valleys — for the last three years has had above average rainfall amounts for the first six months of the year. Luckily this year, we did not have any extensive street, residential or commercial building flooding to speak of. I say luckily, because

I say luckily, because after doing a little research I found that Cassville has had either buildings flooded or streets flooded on the average of approximately every 20 months.

Having been a FEMA employee and having been a floodplain administrator for over 25 years of my professional life, when I would return to Cassville to visit family and friends, I would wonder why is Cassville allowing things to be built in flood prone areas. I’ve seen the devastation that flooding can do, such as leaving 3 inches of mud in a house, such as washing a house off of its foundation, such as washing cars off of roads and yes even seeing the results after somebody had been trapped in a flooded car.

A few years ago, before I retired and came back to Cassville, I found out that the city of Cassville had gone to great lengths to not be in the National Flood Insurance Program (with all the advantages of being in the national flood insurance program, this did not make sense at all, but that will be the topic of another letter).

The major topic of this letter is to ask, in the City of Seven Valleys, why Cassville is dumping dirt in the flood plain across Flat Creek from the city jail and other buildings? Every five or six loads of dirt will raise the floodplain elevation by 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch. This may not seem like much, but with no floodplain regulations to keep other people from doing the same thing, all too soon we will have raised the floodplain elevation enough that somebody is going to flood worse than they have before.

“Why is Cassville doing this to itself and to its citizens?” In order to keep things like this from happening, Cassville needs floodplain management regulations and a Floodplain Management Ordinance.

I am just a born, raised and educated Cassville and Barry County resident trying to use my education and experience to help Cassville to be a better place for many, many years to come, but I do have and will have questions until we start doing things to control, or at least mitigate, the flooding problems in Cassville.

H Lynn Hilburn

Cassville