Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.ROCK PORT, Mo. — Jim Gerking carefully picks his path on a narrow highway ledge that disappears into the flooded Missouri River.
The 73-year-old businessman from Brock, Neb., walks along U.S. 136 near Rock Port and looks at brown water that smells faintly of sewer. He says it has retreated about a foot in recent days.
When it recedes another two miles, he'll walk back into his plant for the first time since June 24.
And some of his 15 laid-off employees will go back to work.
And he'll stop losing money.
Gerking knows you're beat down only if you stay down.
So he's getting back up.
Just like before.
He and his wife, Deanne Gerking, own EnTire Recycling Inc. At their plant three miles from the river on the Missouri side, they grind waste tires into granules that are mixed with road asphalt, turned into mulch or molded into rubber mats. Their most well-known product is the rubber "soil" in the synthetic turf at Memorial Stadium and a growing number of football fields around the country.
Their employees process about 1 million waste tires annually from Iowa, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska. The 100,000-square-foot plant, when operating, keeps old tires out of landfills from Omaha to McCook.
Until the flood, they were on pace to generate $3 million in gross revenue for the year.
"I doubt if we will now," Gerking says. "I know we won't."
In the meantime, waste tires aren't piling up. Gerking is trucking his tires to the Butler County Landfill near David City, where they are shredded. Although Nebraska regulations prohibit whole tires from being dumped into landfills, shredded rubber can be used as a top cover, said Kelly Danielson, the landfill's assistant district manager.
Gerking says he pays a tipping fee to the landfill, an additional cost at a time when he can least afford it.
But he and his wife are experienced at overcoming setbacks. For more than three decades, they were in the grain business in Brock until they could no longer resist the tide of industry consolidation. They started EnTire in 1996 in Nebraska City, but a devastating fire in 2002 forced them to move.
In 2002, they bought the former beef packing plant at Phelps City, an unincorporated town two miles west of Rock Port. They have continued to live at their home in Brock, making the 30-minute daily commute.
The plant was protected by a levee, and previous floods never reached the spot, so the Gerkings never considered buying flood insurance.
"It was just going to be the ideal location," he says with a laugh. "We thought."
Deanne Gerking adds: "We have to laugh or we'll spend all our time crying."
They learned Memorial Day weekend that high water was coming. Starting May 31, they began preparations, which included moving sacks of ground rubber weighing more than a ton each. They bought a closed gas station/restaurant on a bluff overlooking the Interstate 29 interchange at Rock Port to use as an office and storage area.
They also sleep at the office during the week because their commute now takes about 2½ hours.
Lots of family friends showed up with semitrailers to help with the move.
"I'd never been on the receiving end of someone bringing in water and sandwiches to feed people helping us," Deanne Gerking says. "It's pretty humbling — very humbling."
For now, they have an inventory of ground rubber they can ship to customers. But it won't last long.
Gerking and his son, Kent, who is plant manager, navigated a boat to the plant on July 31. The basement was filled and four feet of water stood in the first floor.
The building consists entirely of concrete and steel, he says. It will wash.
He can't retire, he says. He doesn't fish or golf. What else would he do?
At the moment, he has time to research management of the river by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Regardless of what they say about heavy rains and record snowmelt, he's convinced that the upstream reservoir system was too full.
And he fears it could be too full next spring.
"Very scary," he says. "It's going to be scary again next year."
Colossal floods two years in a row might even keep Jim Gerking down.
Contact the writer:
402-473-9580, joe.duggan@owh.com
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