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By Pauline Masson –
It might seem unbelievale that a pair of unrleated events that brought us into the modern age 70 years ago set in motion the traffic woes on today’s Candlwick Lane.
Joe Dailey developed Pacific’s first industrial park on the south end of town in 1954. In 1957 the Russians launched the first artificial satellite to circle the globe, giving it a funny name that most of us remember.
Thirty years later, in a second set of coincidences, the Meramec River spilled out of its banks inundating the only entry/exit road to Dailey industrial park just as Sputnik’s great secret was being opened to the public.
The Great Flood of 1982 was the most destructive flood Pacific residents had endured since Great Flood of 1915. The fast rushing Meramec roared into old town Pacific as far as the railroad levee, reaching a depth of 18.6 feet above flood level.
On Saturday evening, Barbara and Bud Brundick returned to their house on East Orleans Street from a bank Christmas party. “I could hear the roar of the moving water,” Barbara recalled. I thought we shouldn’t stay but Bud said no, the house has never flooded. We’ll be okay. Barbara woke Sunday morning to the sound of Bud moving tractors and trucks to higher ground. Within an hour, the water sloshed into the house and was quickly up to her thighs. “It was rising that fast,” she said.
Dairy farmer Pete Grimm watched the rain from his house on Hwy O all day Saturday and all day Sunday. The National Weather Service reported that 20 inches of rain fell in the Pacific area in two days. Keeping his eyes on his cows that were collected on a patch of high ground, Mr. Grimm watched as some boys tried to persuade his cows to cross the rushing creek. As they did the cows were swept away.
“I lost a lot of cows in that flood,” Mr. Grimm said. By Monday a.m. the surging Meramec had flooded his house to a level of four feet. It was the first time in his or his parents’ memories that flood waters entered the house.
This flood would go down in history as the flood that completely wiped out the City of Times Beach after deadly dioxin, sprayed to control dust, seeped into the flood water..
But in Pacific, the fast rising water revealed a massive oversight in City of Pacific planning.
As the rushing flood water rose five feet in an hour, cresting at 33.64 feet on Monday, December 6, it became clear to city fathers that the weekend timing of the flood had averted a disaster. If the flood had poured into the city later in the week, the factories in Dailey Industrial Park, which had only one entry/exit road, would have been filled with workers with no way out.
The decision was clear. An emergency exit out of the industrial park would have to be built.
When Harlan and Barbara Bruns bought the Stelzer farm to develop a subdivision they had not hint of worries about floods or over the road big rigs.
As Ed Gass, former Pacific road commissiioner recalls, the City saw the proposed subdivision as the solution to a nagging problem. Officials approached Mr. and Mrs. Bruns to acquire a 50 foot strip of land along the edge of the new subdivision for a road. But the Brunses already had a plat with a road down the center of the subdivision and planned to sell lots on each side of the road.
The city agreed to build the road as an emergeny exit from the industrial park. The city applied for and was awarded a federal matching grant to construct the road. Once the road, named Candlewick Lane, was completed a gate was placed across the end to prevent routine traffic into the industrial park.The gate would be opened when the Meramec rose to allow industrial park traffic to exit.
That happened in 1993 and 1994. City workers opened the gate when the water rose and closed it again when the water receded. Seven lesser floods occurred between 1994 and 2008. It is uncertain when the city gave up on all the opening and closing the gate, and just took it down, surrendering the road to industrial park workers who began to take Candlewick Lane to go to work.
It seemed to work for a time and neither the city nor the developers had reason to worry about a newfangled idea that was making its way through the high tech world
By 1982, thirty years after Sputnik, a host of America military satellites were circling the earth as technicians honed the lessons, learned accidentally. The U. S. Navy and ham radio opertors noticed, early on, that the frequency of the radio signals transmitted by the small Russian satellite increased as it approached and decreased as it moved away. It was remarkable. Satellites could be tracked from the ground and, more to the point of our story, locations of receivers on the ground could be tracked by their distance from the satellites. This was the foundation of modern GPS.
Originally, only the military could use the technology. But by 1982 President Ronald Reagan, saw many uses for knowing where things wer located and decided that GPS should be open to commercial civilian use. In 1990 President Bill Clinton said anyone should be allowed to use it. In 2000 freight companies saw how it could help the efficiency of their deliveries and American manufacturers began building GPS devices.
At first the freight companies used it to track where their trucks were at any given time, but everybody got smarter and soon GPS devices inside the cab could directed the driver from his base to his destination.
Today, when we all have GPS on our cell phones, a high-tech GPS systems called CoPilot, is so sophisticated it notifies the big rig driver of low bridges, high water, speed traps, icy roads, traffic jams and the easiest route to their destination.
Pacific’s Candlewick Lane, a lovely 18 home subdivision sets between arriving big rigs and their delivery destinations in an adjoining industrial park.
I purchased a Magellan GPS unit in 2004, it required you to purchase upgraded maps every 6 months or so for about $70. You had a choice; fastest (shortest distance) time, most use of highways, least use of highways. Cities could notify the two or three map companies of truck routes and one-way streets. It usually took up to a year to get such updates posted.
Now with cell phone based GPS for most citizens these options don’t exist for cities. Many truckers use their own phones rather than company supplied software units , to make it harder for the boss to keep track of the truckers meanderings. Truckers were always an independent lot.
Build a bypass road for cars and employees only, try connecting Myers Farm Ln. to Capper. Let Denton road and Jefferson handle the trucks. And the new Candlewick by-pass for trucks during floods.