Flood Fight Continues In Edmunds County

ROSCOE, SD - The flood fight continues in Edmunds County.

As we told you earlier this week, people have been cut off from their homes due to rising water. From trenching to pumping water, the county is fighting back and its efforts are paying off. Some roads once under water are now above water.

But there's still a ways to go and people who don't have an open road home.

"Just trying to keep ahead of putting in culverts where we need to put in culverts, get rid of this water," highway superintendent Lenny Uhrich said.

And Uhrich says that's just the beginning. Right now the county is running three large pumps which workers with the highway department are moving from place to place as needed.

Crews have also dug trenches. But despite seeing progress, they still aren't keeping up with it all.

"I say we'll be working this way for another week or so before we can start catching up," Uhrich said.

At the beginning of the week, there was only one passable road leading to some homes south of Roscoe. It was already flooded then, and now you can only pass over it by tractor.

Hope for those homeowners now lies in a trench which should let enough water flow away so that a road in their area can surface.

"Hopefully they can have a road there within the next week or so," Uhrich said.

With no streams in the area to carry the water away, the only other alternative is to let routes remain flooded for who knows how long. Some roads have already been under for months.

"We're just sitting with the water until it evaporates or we pump it to another slough until it evaporates," Uhrich said.

Those three pumps each burn more than $200 of fuel a day. The highway department's first choice is to trench but that's not always feasible and other landowners need to OK the fact that more water could soon run onto their property.