Clean-up continues in northwest Iowa near Doon where 32 B-N-S-F railcars carrying oil derailed June 22. Fourteen of the 32 cars leaked approximately 230-thousand gallons of crude oil into flooded farm fields, some it making into the Little Rock River. The trains began running again in three days — but the D-N-R’s Environment Program Supervisor, Ken Hessenius, says there’s lots of clean up left to be done. “There’ll certainly be a period of weeks and months of cleanup of that oil and residue that has escaped into the river floodplain. There’ll be a lot of negative removal and there’ll be some soil removal undoubtedly,” Hessenius says.

Hessenius says the conditions around the accident site are making it tough to get right in. “Of course flooding has added to some of the headache here in that areas are not accessible to equipment to get in there to do some of the necessary cleanup,” he explains. Flooding is believe to have caused the cars to derail. Hessenius says he’s never had to deal with a spill of oil this large in his 30-year history in northwest Iowa. “There was a release — actually a derailment of ethanol cars — near Graetnger about a year-and-a-half ago that we worked with,” Hessenius “The only other thing that I can think of in my years here was the explosion at the Terra nitrogen blast down near Sergeant Bluff. And I believe that was 1994, and that was a release of anhydrous ammonia and other chemicals.”

At this point, the number of gallons spilled is still an estimate. Hessenius thinks it’s a fairly accurate assessment of the total and the railroad will eventually come up with final numbers.  Hessenius says he thinks the response went very well with good cooperation between the railroad, the city of Doon, and its residents.

(Radio Iowa)

Sheriff’s officials in Adams County report deputies were dispatched to the Riverview Apartments in Corning at around 12:25-a.m. today (Tuesday), for a report of an intoxicated man who was allegedly threatening to break windows out of vehicles. An investigation resulted in the arrest of Dalton Nicholson, of Corning, for Public Intoxication, and Disorderly Conduct. Nicholson was being held in the Adams County Jail on a $600 bond.

FOUNTAIN HILLS, Ariz. (AP) — An Arizona grand jury has indicted a man on manslaughter charges in the deaths of four pedestrians near Phoenix four months ago. Authorities say the SUV 27-year old Alex Bashaw was driving, jumped a curb and struck married couples from Iowa and Canada as they waited to cross a street in Fountain Hills about 32 miles northeast of Phoenix. Three people were killed in the collision and the fourth person died of his injuries months later. 72-year-old Robert Bonta and his 71-year-old wife Karen, of Wever, IA, died in the crash.

Maricopa County Sheriff’s officials say Bashaw, who showed no signs of impairment following the crash, moved to Ohio after the March 23 collision. They say he’s been arrested on the grand jury warrant and is awaiting extradition to Maricopa County.

While parts of central Iowa saw severe flash flooding and damage to hundreds of homes after recent rains, Missouri River levels are expected to stay high throughout summer and into fall. Hydrologist Kevin Stamm, with the U-S Army Corps of Engineers, says they’re revising up all estimates for the Missouri due to unusually high mountain snowpack run-off.  Stamm says, “The 2018 calendar year run-off forecast for the Upper Missouri basin above Sioux City, Iowa, is 39.8 million acre feet, which is 150% of average.”

June run-off into the system above Sioux City was about 300-percent of normal. Joel Knofczynski, a senior hydraulic engineer in the Corps’ Omaha office, says there’s still room in the reservoirs upriver to hold back very large quantities of water.”Reservoir system storage is currently 68.4 million acre feet, or 12.3 million acre feet into the 16.3 million acre feet of available flood storage,” Knofczynski says. “Approximately 25% of the flood storage is still available to capture run-off.”

Knofczynski says releases from Gavins Point Dam near Yankton are already strong and they’ll increase substantially over the next few days. “Currently, Gavins Point releases are 42,000 cubic feet per second and will be increased to 60,000 cubic feet per second and possibly higher as downstream tributary flows recede,” he says.

The Corps expects to maintain the high flows into the fall months to get the upstream reservoirs down to ideal winter levels.

(Radio Iowa)

Authorities in Fremont County issued a news release a little after 10:30-pm., Monday, saying that a 16-year old male from Sidney who had not been seen since Sunday evening, has been located. Additional information about where he was found was not released.

Officials had put out a request for the public’s help in finding Joshua Michael Brace Lutz, just before 4-p.m., Monday. Lutz was last seen wearing American flag swim trunks.  He was not wearing shoes or a shirt at the time of his disappearance.