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MO stakeholders take ‘wait and see’ approach to Kansas study of MO River diversion

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Missouri stakeholders are taking a “wait and see” attitude about the study of a proposal to funnel water from the Missouri River into western Kansas to irrigate crops and replenish the Ogallala Aquifer. The proposal is that during times of high water or flooding on the Missouri, as much as 4 million acre-feet of water could be diverted. The study is expected to begin next year and take 18 months.

A kayaker travels on the Missouri River past the State Capitol at Jefferson City.

A kayaker travels on the Missouri River past the State Capitol at Jefferson City.

Randy Asbury is the Executive Director of the Coalition to Protect the Missouri River. He says the concern among Missouri stakeholders is that once an aqueduct is built, its beneficiaries will lobby to increase when it is used and how much water it provides.

“Is this just the camel’s nose coming under the tent?” asks Asbury. “At a time when water is needed, if the infrastructure’s in place, if the aqueduct is operating, would they then want water not only in flood events but also at other times?”

He says stakeholders in Missouri have seen such escalation with other issues regarding River management. He says an example would be when the Master Manual for Management of the River was developed.

“We saw at that time that as people had opportunity to push for something for their state’s interest, many times they didn’t want what they originally requested, they wanted more.”

Asbury says 4 million acre-feet is no small amount of water.

“That amount of water, taken at an inopportune time, could be very devastating even to municipal water supplies or to electric generators in this area. They have to have water to get into their intakes.”

Asbury says while the issue is only the subject of a study, stakeholders in Missouri are watching to see what develops. He says there is a belief that the project will prove too expensive to pursue, after a 1982 study put the cost at $3.6 billion dollars at that time. That cost today could be as high as $25 billion.

The “wait and see” attitude could change quickly, however.

“I’m confident there would be many attorneys lined up by many organizations to fight this, so it’s not something that would be conceded at any point if ever there was the opportunity for this to actually take place. There would be legal challenges galore around it.”

Kansas officials are preparing for legal challenges, however. The Shawnee Dispatch in Shawnee, Kansas reports State Representative Sharon Schwartz (R-Washington) recommending, “you might want to put money in our litigation fund,” at a recent rollout for the study.

The Shawnee Dispatch also reports that Officials in Kansas view the Missouri River diversion as the best option for bolstering the Aquifer that stretches from Nebraska to Texas. A groundwater management district in Garden City, Kansas, has considered filing an appropriation for water rights from the Missouri River in anticipation of litigation.

Asked whether Missouri stakeholders should be speaking up more now, Asbury says to do so might have them getting ahead of themselves.

“I think there is adequate time here, if there is a need to oppose it, to do so.”

Governor Jay Nixon has not held back his disagreement with the proposal, however, penning a letter last week to Kansas Governor Sam Brownback urging him to scrap the plan.

Nixon urges Kansas governor to scrap study of Missouri River diversion

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Governor Jay Nixon has issued a letter to his counterpart in Kansas urging him to reconsider that state’s intention to study diverting water from the Missouri River into Kansas. Nixon tells Governor Sam Brownback the Missouri River is vital to Missouri’s way of life and economy.

A 1982 study of the plan to divert water from the Missouri River into Kansas put the cost at an estimated $3.6-billion dollars. (photo courtesy; Missouri Department of Natural Resources)

A 1982 study of the plan to divert water from the Missouri River into Kansas put the cost at an estimated $3.6-billion dollars. (photo courtesy; Missouri Department of Natural Resources)

Kansas officials are planning to move forward with a study of constructing an aqueduct to divert 4 million acre-feet of water from the River into Western Kansas to help support agriculture.

Nixon tells Brownback, “Both of our states would benefit from a more global discussion of the future use of the Missouri River,” adding, “neither of our states is well-served by the approach exemplified by this project.

See Nixon’s letter here.

Barge associations to Obama: order more water to save Mississippi River barge traffic

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Two river barge trade groups say barge traffic on the Mississippi River could come to a halt next week if someone doesn’t put more water in the River.

Waterways Council, Inc. is one of two groups that says as early as next week there won’t be enough water in the Mississippi River for the towboats that move barges to operate. It has joined the American Waterways Operators in calling on President Barack Obama to act to avoid an effective closure.

Two unions say after next week, barges on the Mississippi River will have to remain tied up until as late as April unless the Corps of Engineers releases more water into the Missouri River or the Midwest gets lots more rain.

Two unions say after next week, barges on the Mississippi River will have to remain tied up until as late as April unless the Corps of Engineers releases more water into the Missouri River or the Midwest gets lots more rain.

Waterways Council President Mike Toohey says for every 60 days barges stay off the Mississippi, 20,000 jobs and $130 million in wages are threatened and $7 billion in commodities are stranded.

“The inputs to manufacturing such a chemicals, which are a huge component of transportation on the waterways, simply don’t reach the manufacturing facilities … because there really is no other alternative to water transportation. The railroads do not have the water side deliver access that is necessary and we do not have enough trucks to take up the slack.”

Corps of Engineers spokesman Mike Petersen agrees levels are likely to get low enough to keep towboats off the River, but says the Corps can not release more water.

“The Missouri River can’t operate for the support of Mississippi River navigation just by their legal authorities, but the more important question is that if we start releasing water, we’re looking at year one of a drought. We don’t know how many years this drought is going to go on and it’s tough making decisions with water resources in a good year, but we have to keep our eyes on the long-term as far as what we’re going to do with water in any of the Corps reservoirs across the nation if we’re going to be dealing with a persistent drought.”

Toohey says the shut down could last until April unless some significant rain comes to break the drought and raise River levels.

The unions say towboats need a nine-foot draft to operate, and Toohey says very few vessels on the Mississippi can operate with anything more shallow. The unions say the River will be down to 8 feet next week.

Petersen says the Corps is already doing all it can.

“We actually just started releasing some additional water from Carlyle Lake. This would be the second kind of burst of water from Carlyle to support navigation through that reach of River at Thebes (Illinois) … that’ll reach Thebes at about the same time that the forecasts expect us to reach critically low levels.”

Petersen adds, “but ultimately … it’s going to take a whole lot of rain to get us back to normal.”

Corps: more room needed in Missouri River channel, not reservoirs, for flooding

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The Corps of Engineers has released a study that suggests more room to hold flood waters is needed along the Missouri River channel, not in its upstream reservoirs.

The Missouri River Basin (courtesy; US Army Corps of Engineers)

The study evaluated how greater storage allowances in the reservoirs would have performed in historic runoff years between 1930 and 2011. The findings say more storage would not have prevented widespread damage in the 2011 flood, or the need for record releases from those reservoirs.

Northwest Division Commander Brigadier General John McMahon says it showed that additional flood control storage, alone, is not the answer.

“We’ve got to have adequate channel capacity to accommodate whatever flow we decide to.” What that means is, “generally, it’s moving the levees further back to accommodate whatever flow you want to design an improved system to.”

General McMahon says since the 1944 Flood Control Act was written, conditions on the River have changed. “The levees that were envisioned in that original authorization, some of them were never built. In other cases, they weren’t separated by the recommended distances to accommodate 100,000 cubic feet-per-second flows. In addition to that what we have is a lot of accumulation of soil deposits in the flow way and channel degradation.”

He says increasing channel capacity does not necessarily mean taking land out of farm production. “You can still farm on the wet side of the levee when it’s not flooded there, which is most of the time. And oh, by the way, there’s always what we call ‘interior drainage,’ that is land taken out of production that’s on the dry side of the levee but because of local drainage it’s flooded and it stays flooded because there’s no accommodation for draining that field through the levee. So the notion is not it’s an either/or proposition.”

View the Corps’ study here

The Corps says the report is not intended to be a complete analysis of impacts and is not a decision document. General McMahon says, “it begins the dialogue in the Basin to help discern what we might do in the future to reduce flood risk, to increase performance of the system and its resilience, to minimize damage due to events like we endured during 2011.”

AUDIO:   Jody Farhat presents a summary of the Corps Study

Corps: Missouri River reservoir prep on schedule

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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ effort to open up storage space on upstream reservoirs to receive runoff this spring is going according to plan.

The Corps updated the media tonight and Water Management Division Chief Jody Farhat said already about 500,000-acre-feet more storage is open now than a year ago. “The total system storage in the main stem reservoir system is currently at 56.4-million-acre-feet. That’s 400,000-acre-feet below the base of annual flood control pool, thus providing an additional 400,000-acre-feet of additional flood control storage for the 2012 runoff season. Last year at this time system storage was at 56.9, about 100,000-acre-feet above the base of annual flood control zone.”

Farhat says that gives the Corps some wiggle room. “What this additional storage gives us is the opportunity perhaps in the spring to hold additional water back if we get rainfall events downstream. Having that additional storage provides just a little bit of additional flexibility.”

The extra space also allows more room for higher inflows upstream as well, but right now Farhat says the snowpack does not look threatening. Farhat says the snow-water equivalence on the plains reported by the National Weather Service remains less than one inch, with few exceptions. NWS shows a below-normal mountain snowpack throughout the Missouri River basin as well, though storms this week have increased that amount.

With the River and most of its reservoirs having frozen up this week, Farhat says the Corps will increase flows into the River beginning tomorrow. “We’ll step up our releases from Garrison at a rate of about 1,000-cubic-feet-per-second every other day until we reach 26- or 27,000 in early February.”

Nixon challenges EPA on water transfer decision

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Attorney General Jay Nixon has filed a challenge to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to try and stop a decision that could be a backdoor way to transfer water from the Missouri River basin to the Red River basin. Missouri joined 8 other states and a Canadian province of Manitoba in a lawsuit filed in federal court in New York declaring the water transfer loophole illegal.

The states and Manitoba want the courts to reverse an EPA decision changing a long-standing rule requiring federal Clean Water Act permits for discharging polluted water from one water body to another. The lawsuit seeks to have the Court invalidate the EPA’s June 9, 2008 regulation and declare the water transfer loophole illegal. They argue that nothing in the federal Clean Water Act gives the EPA the authority to eliminate the permit requirement for these transfers.

The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals has twice rejected this EPA regulation as has a federal district court in Florida, said Spokesman Scott Holste with the Attorney General’s office.

"What this means in layman’s terms is that pretty much anybody would be able to transfer water from one water body to another without having the oversight and regulation that is connected to having a federal clean water permit," he said.

If this regulation sticks, Holste said there could be problems for the river ecosystem.

"I think one of the concerns about transferring water from one basin to the other is also the possibility that you’re going to have native species of fish that can be transferred between water shed," he said. "Anytime you have that type of transfer of species of fish or other aquatic life it can cause problems for the existing aquatic life that could be in the river."

download or listen to Aurora Meyer’s story here.

Flooding crisis continuing through Easter weekend

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Peter Kinder Public Safety Director Mark James says flash flooding has stranded a lot of people.  He adds there have probably been more water rescues in the last two days than there have been in years.

And the worst might be yet to come.  The Meramec River is well above flood stage, and is threatening to close down part of Interstate 44.  The river is not expected to crest until Saturday – at levels at or near 43 feet.  Missouri State Water Patrol Commissioner Colonel Rad Talburt says many of his officers are being posted in areas along the Meramec when it is flooding its banks and posing threats to people.

Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder (R-MO) has spent a lot of time visiting the flood-ravaged areas. He describes the view from the air over Cape Girardeau and nearby communities as looking like "a vast inland sea."

Missouri State Highway Patrol Superintendent Colonel Jim Keathley warns drivers to steer clear of areas in which water has crossed roads.  He says driving through water-covered roads that appear to be safe might lead to trouble.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been working closely with state official and will provide federal assistance to save lives and protect property.  Preliminary damage assessments will be conducted once the waters have receded.

Emergency personnel can be expected to spend a busy Easter weekend on the job as the threat from the rising floodwaters will remain at least through the weekend. 

Download/Listen: Steve Walsh report (:60 MP3)

Farm Bureau Joins with State in Opposing Missouri River Dumping

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Missouri Farm Bureau officials join state officials in pressing the Army Corps of Engineers to quit dumping soil into the Missouri River.

Missouri Clean Water Commissioners have rejected a suggestion by the Corps of Engineers to study the impact of dumping tons of soil into the Missouri River; an effort to provide habitat for the endangered pallid sturgeon. Leslie Holloway with the Missouri Farm Bureau says the project is expensive, perhaps as much as $3 billion over 30 years. Holloway says the suggestion to study the project appears to simply be a delaying tactic.

A sore spot with state and Farm Bureau officials is that the Corps began dumping soil into the Missouri without notifying the state about its intentions. Holloway says it makes no sense for the Corps to dump soil into the Missouri while Missourians pay a tenth of a cent sales tax to conserve topsoil. The Army Corps of Engineers project could eventually dump 24 million tons of soil into the Missouri River.

The Missouri Farm Bureau worries that the project will further hurt barge traffic on the Missouri River, an important transportation source for farmers. 

Download/listen Brent Martin reports (:60 MP3)

McCaskill Swims Upstream on Water Resource Bill

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Sen. McCaskill has voted against a bill that would authorize a nearly $2 billion improvement to the upper Mississippi River lock and dam system, because she disapproves of the method used to authorize such projects.

The Water Resource Development Act (WRDA) won approval in the Senate on an 81-to-12 vote. The bill authorizes $1.95 billion for seven new locks on the upper Mississippi River and another $1.7 billion for environmental restoration. The bill authorizes flood control, environmental restoration and navigation projects on the nation’s water ways. Missouri has nearly 1,000 miles of river frontage on the Missouri and Mississippi.

Sen. Bond championed the measure during Senate floor debate. Bond said the bill is long overdue, at times even referring to it as the 2001 bill that never won approval. Bond said the improvements to the Mississippi river way were vital to industry and agriculture. His office stated that a single medium-sized barge tow carries the same freight as 870 trucks.

McCaskill was among the 12 senators who voted against the bill. She points out only here, on water resources, does the federal government require Congress to approve individual projects.

McCaskill stated on the Senate floor, "I believe as a former auditor that we should be allowing the Army Corps of Engineers to direct funding based on a cost-benefit analysis. A cost-benefit analysis would allow the prioritization of projects based on the best value for our dollar."

McCaskill also objects that Senate and House negotiators slipped projects into the bill when reconciling differences between the two chambers. McCaskill said any project included in the bill should be fully debated on the Senate and House floors, "This isn’t about the projects. This is about the process."

Download/listen Brent Martin reports (:60 MP3)

State Launches Website as Gateway to Missouri River Water Trail

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The state government has launched a website aimed at publicizing one of this nation’s great rivers – the Missouri River.

Bryan Hopkins with the State Department of Natural Resources says this website is a gateway to the Missouri River Lewis & Clark Water Trail , which at 550 miles will be the longest river water trail in the country.

The site has everything most people would need to know to begin the process of exploring and enjoying the Missouri River. It has detailed maps with access points and points of interest. There is also information on safety with tips on navigating the river. With 150 miles of the Katy Trail State Park’s 225 miles already along the river, many amenities already exist to support the water trail.

The website is a joint effort of the Department of Natural Resources, the Department of Conservation, and the Department of Economic Development’s Division of Tourism.

The Internet site is www.missouririverwatertrail.org .

Download/Listen: Steve Walsh report (:60 MP3)