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I’m getting ready to write letters to whomever necessary to understand why Roselle gage is shut down.
Before I start this campaign, does anyone else already have information on why it is down, and is it planned to be repaired?
I wholeheartedly agree with Chuck, seems like .GOV is trying to squeeze some extra funds from us good kayaking folks. By my estimate there are well over 300 River Gages in MO.
Why does Roselle need to be shut down?
What is the hit count on people checking Roselle gage vs. the other gages in MO?
From previous contact with USGS, I believe that the Saint Francis gages are funded by the US Army Corps of Engineers who are responsible for Lake Wappapello and it’s water shed. There are 7 gages on the St. Francis alone, why is the Saco gage more important than Roselle for example?
Maybe we should start a petition and get all MWA signatures, or I could try to compose a form letter which any interested party can forward to the powers who control the gage, and your local representatives.
Thank you,
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The gage isn’t down. The gage works fine. The issue is that the USGS dropped the Roselle gage from their nationwide gage network. The data and chart can be found on the (parallel?) US Army Corps of Engineers river gage network:
You can look at other USACE gages from here: USACE gages , by selecting St. Louis District, and then St. Francis basin.
After the last outage (when it was down after 4th of July), we corresponded with the USGS about getting it fixed. They said okay, but that they were planning to drop the gage “soon”, which turned out to be about 2-3 days after it was back on-line. In further conversations with them, about “why Roselle?” (and not any of the scores of other gages that are co-managed by USGS & USACE), they indicated that, different from all the other gages, Roselle was 100% owned, operated & managed by USACE. They also alluded to potential issues of data quality assurance (since their USGS folks were not regularly visiting, checking & calibrating the Roselle gage). Thus, it didn’t meet their data standards. Apparently, USACE cut the funding for USGS to manage the Roselle gage (but apparently not all the others). It sounds like it could be an inter-agency food fight.
So, the question is – what makes Roselle the exception? And who do we lean on to restore the Roselle gage to the USGS network. (We prefer that, because it gives us the ability to display the data on our webpage, get email & text notifications, and enables phone calls to the gage.) But so far, we don’t know why Roselle is different, or who to contact. I’ve written to the one USACE gage contact we had (John Tansil contacted him a few years ago), but so far have not gotten a response. I’m next going to send a similar letter to the USACE “Contact Us” folks, to see if that gets any action.
If anyone has any other potential contacts at USACE, or USGS, who can tell us how to proceed, chime in. Political support would also be valuable…
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Thanks Jim,
I knew that someone would probably have more information than I did.
For reference, during our government “shutdown” in 2014, I emailed USGS trying to determine why they took “our” gage offline. I had contact with USGS.
At the time, it was explained that National Park Service paid the $14,600 annual operating cost (seems high, but we are talking government agency here)
When the gage came back online, they mentioned it was paid for by Missouri Dept of Natural Resources. No mention of USACE although it’s obvious they still have the gage online.
I received replies from two USGS members:
Paul H. Rydlund Jr. PLS
Supervisory Hydrologist. U.S. Geological Survey
Missouri Water Science Center
1400 Independence Drive
Rolla, Missouri 65401
Office (573) 308-3572
Cell (573) 202-3994
- Shane Barks
Deputy Director
U.S. Geological Survey
Missouri Water Science Center
1400 Independence Road
Rolla, MO 65401
(573) 308-3674
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