I just have to vent a little.
My family has about 80 acres along the Elkhorn, north of Fremont. Our west border is on an outside bend on the river, on a high bank. Upstream was a long oxbow loop which slowed the river down good enough that erosion wasn’t that bad.
Within the last ten or fifteen years (I don’t remember, honestly), somebody illegally cut a channel across the loop, making the river flow faster. Ever since then, the outside bend of the main channel has been eating away our land. It was 10 feet a year at first, but with the massive amounts of rain recently, we’re losing about 10 feet a week. The river took our shed last year. We have lost two trees in the last couple weeks, and it’s just going faster and faster. My uncle emailed me a couple pics today, and said that it looks like we could lose the access road and the cabin within a year or two.
We wanted to put down some rip-rap or some sort of erosion control, but the state won’t let us. And as far as I know, nobody took any responsibility for cutting the channel.
I know, there’s not much we can do. And, technically, our land is still there… it’s just underwater right now. We’ll have property on the other side of the river soon, I guess. It just makes me sad to see the river coming right at us.