He explained that while flooding doesn’t usually impact the property too much, there are a few problems that they’ll need to address.
“A lot of it is just cleaning the debris away from some of our trails and some of our picnic areas. We’ll have to get out and assess our trail bridges; we haven’t been able to get out there at this point to see if they’ve been damaged or not. During our last flood in April, one of our bridges was damaged and we had to do some repair work to it, so that may be the case this time. We just haven’t been able to reach that bridge just yet,” Gillum said.
Fortunately, the flood level wasn’t even close to the record high set in 2009, which Gillum said was about three feet higher than this flood. Still, portions of the park remain closed.
“We had a couple of buildings that had water enter them in our group camp, we had some of our trails – most notably trail four and parts of trail five – were closed off, and we did close down our river area because the flood water did get over the road and into the parking lot at our river picnic area,” said Gillum.
Gillum said the water level needs to drop just about a foot before the park can be re-opened fully to the public, but even then, trails and other areas will still be very muddy. On top of the water level lowering, Gillum said he’d like to see at least a good week with little rain and good temperatures to help dry things out to allow crews to get out and work on getting things back in shape.
