Third day of the Pocatello EPSCoR adventure!
Submitted by varg3581 on Wed, 2015-06-10 00:00
Yesterday was a blast at the beaver dams. The adventure team measured water quality and learned about the citizen science monitoring of beaver populations. We also were able to fix some more bugs on this blog website. Be sure to check out the new Participants tab, it has the profiles of our participants to see who is joining the Idaho adventure EPSCoR team in Pocatello.
Today the onsite adventurers are going to learning about the history of the Portneuf River and checking out the concrete channel that confines the river through the city. I must say, well done with the blogging by our onsite learners. It is great to see so many great comments, pictures, and videos being uploaded to this website. Have a great day everyone! ALSO, check out this cool short film about the mighty Colorado River. I feel that this film is relevant to our workshop and highlights an issue that slips under the covers here in the United States. FIND IT HERE: https://vimeo.com/63943253
-Wyatt
Comments
History of the Portneouf
It has been quite the adventure today being involved with the history of the city of Pocatello and its history with the Portneouf river. We had the privilege of hearing from Kevin Marsh from the history department at ISU who discussed many of the historical reasons to the levies in Pocatello.
Pocatello first started as a railroad town and the main source of the railroads water came from the Portneouf river for their steam engines. The town began to boom and was known as the gateway to the northwest. Hence the "Gate city". It was the largest city in Idaho at one time. As the town grew many citizens built homes near the river for convenience. During Word War 2 in 1945 the city had a great flood which put the city in flood crisis. The city asked for aid from the government agency on flood control, the Army Cor of Engineers. The Army Cor held them to the laws of the flood act of 1936 which required cities to mach the funds of the federal government. The proposals in the city were not taken well and nothing was done by the city for several years. The Army Cor also did nothing because there were more precidented issues with flooding on the Columbia river. Nothing was done for a decade until the city had two devastating floods in the early 60's. It was then that the citizens chose to make the change and the levies were put in place.
Thoughts
What an incredible history of the Portneuf. Having only lived in Pocatello for 5 years, I love learning about the history of the river.
Interesting
I have really enjoyed learning about the history of the Portneuf and why the decision was made to create the concrete wall. I knew it had to do with flood control, but I did not know that it was constructed so long ago. If changes were to be made to the Portneuf, who would be responsible in footing the bill? Would it be the city of Pocatello be responsible or the state. I can only imagine the cost of removing the the concrete wall and constructing a new and improved ecofriendly water pathway.
Beautiful
What I find the most amazing about this video is the narrative. The way the authors tell the story of the river, combined with the imagery and music creates a strong emotional response towards this river that is drying out. The Colorado River isn't the only river out there like this. If we can harness the storytelling power and use it in the same way to promote cleaning up the Portneuf, I wonder what kind of a response we would get.