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Above, left to right: To make way for the levee, houses had to be relocated. Backyards, including these on Ridge Avenue in Greendale, had to be excavated.
Government red tape intervened and in March of 1940, with contracts still not let, the Register pointed out that “this is a government project and it cannot be pushed as rapidly as if it were a city project.”
Another explanation of the delay was that every parcel of land involved in building the levee would have to be acquired and all titles cleared.
The Press published an urgent plea to all of those property owners to “deal justly and in accord and harmony with the interest striving to bring the grand old town of Lawrenceburg... the greatest material blessing possible.”
Nevertheless, it was June of 1940, almost three and a half years after the flood, before bids were finally opened.
The Marsch, Peterson and Walker Construction Company in Chicago, with a bid of $838,469.25, was a low bidder for the project, which would require more than 2.38 million yards of dirt.
The bid was well under the engineer’s estimate of just over $1 million.
Finally, on June 27, an announcement was made that Marsch had been the successful bidder and work was expected to begin within a couple of weeks.
Four houses would have to be moved from lower High Street to make way for the new levee, and two more on the east side of town were expected to be moved, also.
This time the optimistic predictions were correct, and on July 9, 1940, work actually began.
The construction company had moved in 20 train carloads of heavy equipment and machinery, some of it so huge that an entire car was necessary for just one machine. Residents had turned out by the hundreds to watch the unloading.
The levee project was to proceed at the same time
as the rerouting and expansion of US 50 from its old location near the end of Fourth Street in Newtown, out Ridge Avenue in Greendale and over Oberting Road to near the Ohio State Line to its present route.
Progress on the new levee did not go smoothly.
Early in August, union representatives for the Carpenters, Hod Carriers and Laborers, “trucksters” and Operating Engineers ordered their workmen off the job.