Small Missouri town frustrated by railway’s draining lake

Maybe 20 yards behind Wesley Steffens’ home, a serene pond stretched over 5 acres or more.

It made for decent fishing some days, a blue refuge of serenity nearly all the time.

The small floating dock he built on what locals call Blackburn Pond remains where it has for years. Yet now it sits on land, surrounded by weeds instead of water.

“It’s not a dock anymore. It’s a patio,” Steffens said. “That’s what happens when the water doesn’t reach it anymore.”

A small dam that captured water for the tiny lake busted out amid heavy rains last year. That mostly emptied out the chief scenic landmark in threadbare Blackburn. The pond has since turned mostly to mud, with receding water leaving fish belly up. Most critically, the lake’s demise puts a volunteer force in danger of coming up dry the next time something in town catches on fire.

Local city and county officials blame Kansas City Southern, the owner of the lake and other railroad right-of-way property that cuts through the heart of the town of about 250 people about 70 miles east of Kansas City.

By most accounts, laborers built the small dam and spillway in the last half of the 19th century to provide a water source for passing steam locomotives.

Now a century beyond the Steam Age, Kansas City Southern said in a statement that it no longer needs a reserve of water next to its tracks in Blackburn.

More pointedly, the railroad company said it “is not aware of any agreement in which it is obligated to maintain the pond for use by the community … and has no plans at this time to repair the spillway structure to restore the pond, which would be very costly.”

While the old saw holds that you can’t fight City Hall, in this dispute City Hall may find itself outmatched by a large railroad.

“Certainly, they’ve got the money,” said Larry Mann, a Washington, D.C., transportation safety lawyer often at odds with railroads. “They could keep you going in court forever.”

Fixing the spillway — making sure water escapes only by going over the dam and through a culvert under the railroad tracks — could cost the city of Blackburn about $300,000. And that’s assuming it could make fixes on a structure it doesn’t own and a withering lake bed that extends beyond the city limits.

This is no metropolis with deep pockets. It boasts just a filling station, a farm supply company, a post office and a bank that closes at 11 a.m. Total tax revenue for a year is about $65,000. The City Council is struggling to find money to repave a 100-foot stretch of Main Street.

The town’s mayor, Karlin Breshears, said much of the cost to fix the lake would come from the nightmarish legal and bureaucratic hurdles of a small city getting the necessary permits to mess with railroad right-of-way. She said Kansas City Southern should do the repairs. If the railway simply fixed things, Breshears said, the cost would be closer to $30,000.

“I’ve been working on this for two years,” the mayor said. “It seems like it’s of no concern to” Kansas City Southern.

The result is what she calls a “foul mess.”

Raccoons and other scavengers constantly drag dead fish from the shrinking pond. The smell can get rank. And low water levels reveal old batteries — apparently used for railroad switches generations ago — sitting in the bottom of the lake. Kansas City Southern said it only learned about reports of the batteries recently and is investigating.

Breshears and others in town had long assumed the railroad had an obligation to keep the dam plugged so the pond would stay full. But a search by the city clerk so far has failed to unearth a legal agreement with Kansas City Southern, which acquired the property from Illinois Central, or any of the other railroads that had owned the tracks and right-of-way generations before.

So for now, water that’s supposed to run over the spillway instead runs around it before flowing through a culvert that runs under the railroad bed. Breshears and others in Blackburn contend that will ultimately erode the berm the tracks sit on.

“I worry about a derailment,” said Emmit Williams, the director of the Saline County Emergency Management Department. “That’s when things get serious.”

So the locals called for a railroad inspector from the Missouri Department of Transportation to look things over earlier this month. MoDOT says it’s still studying the situation.

If erosion from a spillway did threaten the safety of the tracks, said MoDOT railroad administrator Eric Curtit, the state would insist the railroad make repairs. It’s yet to make that conclusion, he said.

“It seems like this matter is between the city and the railroad,” Curtit said.

In its statement, Kansas City Southern said, “The condition of the spillway has not affected safe operations of the railroad.”

Mann, the transportation lawyer, said safety issues would give the state the power to order a fix from the railroad, but there’s little else that could.

Most days now, the pond is all but drained down to a shallow mud hole sporting less than 2 feet of water with dead and dying fish.

A pipe that is used to draw from the pond sticks out above the surface of the water except for days following a heavy rain. That has Bill Kellerman, chief of the volunteer West Central Fire Protection District, nervous. His crews are left with only the water they can truck to a fire at the ready.

That supply runs out quickly, he said. So now if a home were to burn in Blackburn, firefighters would have to fetch water from another lake more than a mile away.

“You’ve got to refill your trucks,” he said. “You’d run out of water.”

Steffens, the guy with the dry-land boat dock, remembers water skiing on the lake years ago and an old fishing club that lined the shore near his yard.

This year, he notices an osprey that summered at the lake hasn’t returned. Instead, vultures drawn by the dead fish sometimes circle overhead. Freight trains roll through town two or three times a day.

Steffens concedes he should never have built his dock. After all, the lake shore belongs to Kansas City Southern.

“But the lake has always felt like it belonged to the town,” he said. “We’re seeing now that it’s the railroad’s.”

This story was originally published July 17, 2016 at 3:06 PM with the headline "Small Missouri town frustrated by railway’s draining lake."