Dam Detour

Since the beginning of the year, those of us who live north of town out near the lake have been unable to get from Point A to Point B efficiently.

When completed, new roundabouts at the intersections of U.S. Highway 24 and Kansas Highways 13 and 113 will save time and lives. Part of the work on K-13 involves installing a massive culvert box, a sort of poster child for infrastructure. A rectangular, reinforced concrete structure to channel stormwater under the roadway to prevent erosion. 

Which means you have to tear up the road to install it. For those of us who live near the lake, getting to Manhattan to the south these days requires a scenic act of defiance. We must head north over the dam into Pott County, across the spillway, pick up Dyer/Barnes Roads, ease back into Riley County and, eventually, Point B.

What used to be a straight shot across the highway to Dara’s for a cup of coffee, donut or tank of gas, is no longer. On the other hand, the detour takes us right by Little Grill and we have dined and taken out from there more than we ever would have before (I recommend the wood-fired chicken with a side of sweet cukes). If your business relies on traffic, detours cut both ways.   

There are roughly 150 homes out here on the Riley County side of the lake, in a dozen or so “neighborhoods,” each accessible off their own road, winding in, around, up and down sundry Flint Hills. Roughly the same setup on the Pott County side.

There are no Homeowners Associations out here, that’s part of the allure. The good of the one doesn’t outweigh the good of the many, we just don’t feel like convening a living-room summit at the bottom of the hill to seek consensus on the acceptable Pantone range for our backyard fences, thank you very much.

The detour takes me across the dam at least twice a day, and it has proven a good opportunity to marvel at its human origins.

We see the dredging barge in action. If it doesn’t work, the entire lake will become one big mud puddle in a couple of generations. Think of it as a ginormous underwater squirt gun, shooting massive jets of water downward, lifting silt toward the surface and moving it through the tubes downstream into the Blue, Kaw, Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, on to the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean and beyond.

If some Tuttle Creek Lake mud washes up on the beaches of Fiji, we’ll know the dredging worked.

This is the same barge that recently lost an 1,800-gallon barrel of diesel fuel overboard during a typical breezy day out here. Workers dove into the murk to retrieve it, a drum pitched by winds we’ve had a hand in stirring. The same fuel, of course, that keeps the barge humming as it scours the bottom of a lake we built in the first place.

We’re the people of the south wind, until the north one shows up with an attitude. Then the lake grows teeth, with miniature whitecaps slapping the riprap like they’ve got somewhere coastal to be.

Call us Cannon Beach, Jr. or Kennebunkport-adjacent.     

A KDOT-connected source tells me, weather permitting, Kansas Highway 13 should be back open by month’s end, or early May. The culvert box is in place. Don’t tell anyone, but I recently scrambled over the barricades, peered into the abyss and snapped some pics. A couple of days later, the dump trucks rolled in, which in road-repair language counts as momentum.

Detours can be an unavoidable pain in the neck, but their disappearance usually leaves something better. This dam detour adds another 15 or 20 minutes to the Point B trip. You could look at it as time I will never get back, or maybe it’s time reallocated to ponder what happens when nature takes a man-made course.  

Mike Matson’s column appears every other weekend in The Mercury, and he hosts ‘Within Reason,’ Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 9 a.m. on NewsRadio KMAN.