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Governors of Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska meet with Army Corps officials to discuss flood-prevention

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Three governors feeling the pain of major flooding recently are calling on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to change its management of the Missouri River. The governors of Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa met Wednesday in Iowa with Corps and Federal Emergency Management officials to talk about growing flooding problems. At a press conference Wednesday afternoon in Council Bluffs, Governor Mike Parson says something needs to change.

Three governors at meeting with Army Corps and FEMA officials (photo from @GovParsonMO twitter account)

“For far too long, we’ve had these incidents occur and we’ve had meeting after meeting, but it seems to be the same results all the time. I think it’s time that we need some straight up answers from the Corps of Engineers of how they’re managing the river,” says Parson.

Northwest and southeast Missouri have especially been hit hard by recent flooding. Parson has made a couple of trips to northwest Missouri to view the damage. About half of Nebraska has been devastated by flood waters.

“First of all, we’ve got to find out just kind of what happened. I think we are still looking for those answers,” says Parson. “But more importantly, what can we do in the short-term and what can we do in the long-term. We’re still not out of the woods yet. We still have got water coming out, snow melt and ice coming out, plus spring rains that could really affect us.”

Parson, a Republican, says the management of the river is key to the citizens of each state.

“When you look at the states that are involved here of the Missouri River, it has a huge impact on the United States of what it is we do,” Parson says. “We are totally dependent on the management of those rivers for a lot of reasons. When you talk about that livelihood, that economic development side of it, it is really centered around the management of the rivers. That affects every one of us and the people of our states and the economy of our states. That’s really how important this is.”

From left to right, Governors Parson of Missouri, Ricketts of Nebraska & Reynolds of Iowa (Photo from @GovRicketts Twitter account)

He says there need to be other solutions to prevent further flooding issues.

“You look at the reservoir situation. Can we have more reservoir space to be able to handle this water that we know is going to be coming here every year? Can we build maybe more levees,” asks Parson. “But I think more importantly, does the state take more of an active role in these decisions instead of just leaving it up to one agency? I think the states will have to take more of a role in the management of the river and the Corps is going to have to work with us from a different perspective of what we’ve done than in the past.”

Last Friday, Parson signed an executive order giving the Missouri Department of Natural Resources some flexibility in easing requirements during and after recent Missouri flooding.

He says river management needs to get back to the basics by prioritizing flooding and safety.

Travel problems prevented the governor of Kansas from attending the gathering, but she plans to be part of the next meeting in three weeks.

Copyright © 2019 · Missourinet

Parson signs executive order to ease requirements during, after Missouri flooding

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This is the aerial view of flooding in northwest Missouri taken on March 21, 2019 (photo courtesy of Governor Mike Parson Twitter page)

Governor Mike Parson has signed an executive order today giving the Missouri Department of Natural Resources Director some flexibility in easing requirements during the flood emergency underway. A press release today from the governor’s office says Director Carol Comer will have the discretionary authority to temporarily or suspend environmental rules or regulations currently under her purview during the emergency and following recovery period.

Northwest and southeast Missouri have especially been hit hard by recent flooding.

Parson says the move will best serve the interests of public health and safety.

The governor and some Missouri state and federal officials have criticized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers river management.

Blunt tours Atchinson County, where flood recovery slowly — and fearfully — begins

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-Brent Martin contributed to this report.

U.S. Senator Roy Blunt surveyed flood damage in Atchison and Holt Counties Friday and like, the governor, took aim at the way the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers manages its rivers and reservoirs.

Flood damage at US 159 at Route P in Holt County near Fortescue, Missouri.

“For more than 15 years, I have said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ river management plan is not the right plan for Missouri. After seeing the damage today, it is clear that plan needs to be looked at. The Corps should be prioritizing flood control, navigation, and drinking water. Environmental concerns are a part of that discussion, but the priority should always be on protecting people and property.”

Governor Mike Parson is also outspoken about flood prevention and says he will meet with the governors of Iowa and Nebraska to ready their questions for the Corps.

“What is the management of the river, what’s changed here, why are we having these floods?” he asks.

John Remus, chief of Missouri River Basin Water Management for the Corps told Missourinet a week ago the current focus on the mainstem of the Missouri is flood control.

“Situations where we have high runoff or an event like this, flood control is all we operate for and in fact on the mainstem dams we have done no operations for anything but flood control since March 15th of 2018,” Remus said in a press briefing.

Missourinet contacted the Corps’ public affairs office for additional comment on non-disaster management and policy. We have gotten no response to date.

Meanwhile, farmers and displaced residents are apprehensive.

Brent Martin, KFEQ News Director has been in the field in Northwest Missouri since the flooding began. Yesterday, he spoke with county commissioners who are “fearful that there’s more water coming and these levees are already broken and they are not going to be fixed, probably within two years.”

“It’s a real disaster in Atchison County, especially from I-29 to the river,” according to North District County Commissioner Richard Burke, “And that’s basically everything in the flood plain in Atchison County. That takes in 70,000 acres.”

Read Brent’s story

The United States Department of Agriculture UnderSecretary Bill Northey is also focusing on recovery after touring the area Thursday. He told Martin in an interview that he was not prepared for the scope of the damage

“It’s just mind-boggling to be able it in person, how much water there is and how much water has to get off of here to eventually make this land such that they can get out there and get some planting done,” says Northey, a former Iowa Secretary of Agriculture.

Missouri Congressman Graves: flooding worse than in 1993

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Photo courtesy of KMA News in Shenandoah, Iowa

Northern Missouri Congressman Sam Graves is concerned about long-range effects of flooding underway in his region. Many people are comparing this disaster to the epic 2011 Missouri River flooding. The Tarkio Republican tells Missourinet affiliate KMA in Shenandoah, Iowa this event is worse than the flood of 1993.

To view the story, click 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.”