After flood hits small town, BLM crew has it in the (sand)bag

Story by David Abrams, Public Affairs Specialist, Western Montana District
Photos by BLM staff

As the Land Health Assessment team headed out for the day’s work in the field, they were full of confidence they’d get the routine job finished on schedule. They may even have added a cautionary “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise” to themselves under their breath.

The Lord may have been willing, but unfortunately the creek did rise. In very rapid and dramatic fashion.

Heavy rainfall had already saturated Elk Creek and the area around Augusta, Montana, for days by the time the team from the BLM Butte Field Office arrived in mid-June to check land parcels as part of their scheduled work.

“We headed out from our hotel in Augusta around 7 a.m. that first morning,” said Brandy Janzen, a Natural Resource Specialist with the Butte Field Office. “It was raining and there was water draining along the main street in town but there was no apparent flooding.”

After checking on a parcel outside of town, Janzen and the others headed back in around 9 a.m. The streets were already disappearing under water.

“It hit really fast,” Janzen said.

She and the other five members of the team were trapped in the small town of 300 in north-central Montana: all highways leading into Augusta had been closed.

The National Weather Service in Great Falls reported that eight inches of rain had fallen in the last three days in the mountains where Elk Creek begins its meandering 18-mile journey eastward toward town. By that Tuesday morning, the creek couldn’t hold any more water. At a bend in the waterway, it leapt the bank and headed for Main Street.

As the BLM Land Health Assessment team drove around the streets of Augusta, they realized they had a new mission: help save the town.

“We drove around asking where we could help,” Janzen said.

It wasn’t long before they had shovels and sandbags in hand. The BLM employees started filling bags for individual land owners and businesses along Main Street—which was now a swift-moving chocolate-milk river with the occasional adventure-seeker floating by on an inner tube.

By the next day, the waters had started to recede and the BLM crew members were back working on their regular jobs, but they were glad to know they’d pitched in to assist the residents of Augusta in whatever way they could.

“A lot of us are from small towns,” Janzen said. “It’s what you do in times like this—you help out.”