A popular wildlife park in Gwinnett County is cleaning up after near-record floods from the weekend.

The Yellow River Wildlife Sanctuary, formerly the Yellow River Game Ranch, saw seven feet of water spill over the river banks with the aftermath of Hurricane Delta.

“Sunday morning, we thought we had dodged a bullet when we got here. It looked like the water was not going to come into the property. From that point on, every ten minutes the river was going up about an inch,” owner Jonathan Ordway tells WSB’s Sandra Parrish.

In 2009, Gwinnett was supposed to have experienced a 100-year flood. But the park, located off Hwy 78, and surrounding areas near Lake Lucerne and the Lilburn area saw waters rise close to those levels on Sunday.

Ordway says by 9am, they put their flood protocol into action and moved nearly two-dozen animals in the affected areas to higher ground.

“We went ahead and opened to the public, and soon we realized, ‘Ok, we’re going to have to shut the lower trails down’,” he says, noting the upper half of the park remained open.

Those lower trails are still closed, and the floods destroyed two of the older habitats. But the new ones, built since he and his wife Katy bought the park nearly two years ago, sustained no damage.

“We did design all the new enclosures with this type of flood in mind. It was actually a little higher than our worst-case scenario. But if we had had any more than this, maybe another foot or two, it would have shut us down for a long time,” says Ordway.

He hopes to have the lower trails reopened by next week. But for now, the animals will remain out of those areas.

Cox Media Group