By STAN MADDUX

Indiana Correspondent

GRIFFITH, Ind. — Record flooding in late February has renewed longstanding calls for a fix to the Kankakee River in Indiana and Illinois.

“Thousands of those acres are still flooded. It may be the worst flooding ever, and everyone knows why,” said Keith Halper, president of the Indiana Division of the Izaak Walton League.

That branch of the nationwide organization dedicated to conserving, restoring and promoting the sustainable use and enjoyment of natural resources has pushed for restoration of the Grand Kankakee Marsh and Kankakee River since the 1930s. “It is time to bring some of it back,” Halper said.

The Kankakee River running west from South Bend into Illinois at Channahon is 250 miles long. Work from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s channelized more than half of the river on the Indiana side to make the waterway less meandering and easier to travel for cargo vessels serving the growing needs of an expanding agriculture sector of the economy, according to the Friends of the Kankakee organization and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

A great deal of rich farmland was also created from much of the marsh and swamps along the banks shrinking where the river used to bend. Halper said the river should be returned to its original footprint, with the shipping of goods long a thing of the past, to reduce flooding caused by the river's straightening.

He said channelizing the river basically turned it into a “90-mile drainage ditch,” speeding up flows. The swifter current brings more sediment and sand up from the bottom and from along the banks, then carries the material downstream into Illinois where it's deposited.

During rainy periods, the deposits cause more water to back up and overtake the banks in both states, Halper said. According to him, the solution is allowing the river to reclaim itself by adding setback levees far enough from the banks where it was straightened so the river can start meandering through its natural footprint.

Eventually, through bank erosion, he said the original boundaries of the river would be restored. Sand and silt transported downstream would also return to natural levels.

“That is what rivers do. It will work,” Halper said, adding another benefit would be restoring wetlands that protect water quality and habitat of fish and wildlife.

Jim Sweeney, secretary of the Watseka, Ill.-based Friends of the Kankakee, said the solution proposed by Halper was deemed the answer to the flooding in a 1989 study paid for by the Kankakee River Basin Commission. For whatever reason, though, nothing seems to get done.

In his opinion, there's been considerable resistance by many of the third- and fourth-generation farmers working the land created by the river being straightened. “They don't want to give it up,” he said.

He said one answer could be offering protections to those farmers if they would go ahead and plant crops on land that would be much more flood-prone from a restoration of the banks. A public agency buying the farm ground is another option, he said.

Some areas beside the river like Shelby, a small farming community on the Indiana side in southern Lake County, still recently had thousands of acres of mostly low-lying farmland underwater.

“This is now at a point where we're seeing these extended periods of time where this flooding is going on,” Halper said. “It's time to make that change.”