Some Question Recent Flood Management Decisions
As Missouri River states continue to fight record flooding, many residents are angry at how federal officials managed the rivers and the flooding. While some praise the Army Corps of Engineers for saving their town, others along the river — especially those from downstream states where the water is headed — are asking Congress to look into how the corps balances often-competing interests and chooses which towns to save.
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People living up and down the Missouri and Mississippi rivers have battled historic floods this year. And the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said today that some places won't see a return to normal levels until September or October. The corps controls the locks and dams on both rivers. Those systems can be used to slow the flow of water or divert it onto fields instead of, say, flooding an entire town.
As Iowa Public Radio's Sarah McCammon reports, people in the river's path are increasingly frustrated with how the corps is running things.
(SOUNDBITE OF RUSHING WATER)
SARAH MCCAMMON: So I'm standing on the south side of the Gavin's Point Spillway, here near Yankton, South Dakota. Basicall, what it looks like is this big, concrete and metal structure. And the water kind of comes in and flows more or less downhill. This makes a huge hill before it goes through these gates and creates this enormous splash at the bottom. It's very foamy on the other side of the spillway. Then all that water flows downstream, of course.
DAVE BECKER: We have the largest watershed upstream of us. All those other dams drain into us, so we do have the highest flows down here.
MCCAMMON: Dave Becker is the project manager at Gavin's Point, the last of the Missouri River Dam operated by the Corps of Engineers. The Corps is releasing unprecedented amounts of water here. Imagine enough water every second that it would flood a football field three and a half feet deep. Becker says if the water isn't let out in a controlled way, it would rush over the dams, causing even worse flooding.
BECKER: The magnitude is very difficult for people that are being impacted. You know, it's making life very difficult for people on the river.
MCCAMMON: People like Chris and Nancy Dashner(ph), who live on a farm about 180 miles south of Yankton. Chris has spent most of his 56 years working the fertile ground along the Missouri. He steers his pickup across an earthen levee that's protecting his home and some of his crops, the ones that aren't already underwater.
CHRIS DASHNER: I've never seen the water level this high before against the levee. So it's very, very disturbing.
MCCAMMON: The Dashner's home is mostly dry, for now. But they can't live there because of a mandatory evacuation order. Nancy Dashner wonders why the Army Corps continues to send so much water their way.
NANCY DASHNER: I think there are people who feel like the water came from Montana and came from the upper states but we're the ones, in the lower states, who are feeling the floods.
MCCAMMON: Jody Farhat is the chief of corps' Missouri River Basin Water Management Office in Omaha, where decisions about water releases are made. She says any flooding is regrettable. But in a record year like this, it's also unavoidable. She says the reservoirs are normally kept mostly full to support activities like recreation, navigation and hydropower. Think of a bathtub.
JODY FARHAT: What happened, though, this year, that rain came in and filled up our bathtub. And we still have, essentially, a fire hose coming into the reservoir system, with that mountain snowpack sending up there 135 to 140 percent of normal. So we needed a bigger drain.
MCCAMMON: But some elected leaders in downstream states say the corps should leave more room in that bathtub to respond to floods. They accuse the corps of favoring upstream states who, in normal years, want to hold back enough water for recreation.
Kansas Governor Sam Brownback wants an investigation of the corps' management. Iowa's governor, Terry Branstad, has urged his colleagues in downstream states to form a group devoted to promoting their interests. He says the Missouri River Master Manual, a complicated series of guidelines last updated in 2004, just isn't working.
Governor TERRY BRANSTAD: When you have that kind of snowfall, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure they should have been releasing more, earlier.
MIKE HAYDEN: One of the mistakes people make is thinking that the dams will provide flood protection.
MCCAMMON: That's Mike Hayden, a former Kansas governor and now executive director of the Missouri River Association of States and Tribes. He says dams can only reduce flooding, and he argues that letting water out of the reservoirs earlier would've caused even more problems on the Mississippi River.
HAYDEN: These rivers are connected. So when a drop of water falls at Three Forks, Montana, it ends up in New Orleans.
MCCAMMON: The corps points out that communities up and down the Missouri River have flooded this year, the wettest since at least 1898. And if there's anything folks from Montana to Louisiana can agree on, it's the hope that a season this wet won't come around for another century.
For NPR News, I'm Sarah McCammon.
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