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POW Bridge
Fri Apr 30, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
During a 1945 spring flood, a small South Dakota town faced the loss of a bridge vital
to commerce and the war effort. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton, and this is The Weather
Notebook. As Curt Nickish reports, the bridge and townspeople got help from
unexpected quarters.
In 1945, a large snowpack and wet spring swelled the Missouri River to where it was
eating away at the foundation of a bridge that connects Yankton, South Dakota with
Nebraska. The bridge abutments had to be protected to keep the bridge from
collapsing and blocking barges carrying grain out of the heartland for the war effort.
With millions of GI's overseas, workers were few and far between. But the Meridian
Bridge, an unusual over-and-under construction that puts one lane of traffic right over
the other, got help from 57 German prisoners of war.
JK: They used to march from the airport down Douglas Street here in Yankton, then
across the Meridian Bridge to the work site.
John Kabaiseman was 11 then and remembers at first the town was nervous about
hosting the enemy, but then warmed up to it.
JK: There was one or two ladies used to meet those prisoners coming to work into
town and they'd have pies -- freshly baked pies -- and I don't remember how many --
they would give (them) to these prisoners as they walked by. Nobody stopped it or
anything.
At the work site, the POW's built rip-rapping -- that meant weaving wooden slats into
giant mats and weighing them down with stones on the river bed to stop shore
erosion. They also lined the river with thousands of pylons to divert the channel from
the bridge abutments. Kabeiseman says the experience with the prisoners was good
for the bridge -- and for the town.
JK: It left a good taste in the people's mouth for the reason that they found out that the
enemy, basically, were human beings like themselves. And they were asked as
prisoners of war to do a job, and I guess they did it fairly effectively.
The Meridian Bridge still straddles the mighty Missouri today - 46 years after the
German POW's went home.
Thanks today to Curt Nickish of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Weather Notebook is
supported by Subaru and the National Science Foundation.
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