Connie Edwards and her mother, Susan Lane, who live in this mobile home abutting the Little Wind River just south of Riverton, say at its highest point last weekend the swollen river reached into their front yard.
“We watched it every day so we didn’t have to worry about it,” Lane said. They did not evacuate their home this time, although they did have to leave in February, when the river jammed with ice and spilled its banks. They’ve lived on the property for 17 years, Lane said.
The Little Wind is now closer to their home, Edwards said, after the flood washed out what she estimated to be ten feet of riverbank. The bank isn’t all the high water took. Pointing out the window of her kitchen to a white piece of plastic jutting out of the ground, she said that’s where an empty mobile home that had belonged to her father sat.
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It washed away during the flood, and Edwards doesn’t know where it ended up.
They believe the worst has now passed. For the moment, the rivers around Riverton crested on Saturday, June 10, said Fremont County Emergency Management Coordinator Kathi Metzler. The water might’ve gone higher, were it not for cool temperatures and clouds that moved into the region and slowed the melting of the mountain snowpack.
Metzler said she was encouraging people to keep an eye on water levels and riverbanks, some of which may have been undercut by floodwaters and are now vulnerable to collapse.
