Southern Ill. community misses longtime lake

WALTONVILLE — A community in southern Illinois’ Jefferson County faces a summer without its lake for the first time in more than a century.

WSIL-TV reports that the village of Waltonville’s lake disappeared after flash flooding last year blew an 8-foot hole in the local dam. Village leaders had to intentionally breach the levee to keep water from swamping a nearby highway.

And now, all that’s left of the lake is an empty, open field, with the 44-resident village unable to afford the estimated $1 million cost of recreating the lake.

Mayor Randy Dees calls not having the lake this summer “very sad.”

Having spent his 86 years in Waltonville, Walter Green says he doesn’t like seeing what he calls a field where the water everyone once fished had been.