Six years ago, New Orleans was in shock after Hurricane Katrina hit, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was blamed for bad levees. Some Nebraskans and Iowans have put blame on the Corps of Engineers for the 2011 floods, suggesting the Corps might have held too much water for too long behind dams.
We should not be too fast to blame the Corps for the Missouri River flooding, but there are parallels between these two flood situations.
In the book "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast," Douglas Brinkley, while telling a story masterfully, describes causes of the great damage done by Katrina. Several of the contributing factors were also factors in this year's Missouri River flooding. Wetlands depletion was perhaps the main problem causing vulnerability to Katrina's floodwaters, and it is a big problem in flooding on the middle Missouri River.
Other parallels between Katrina and the 2011 Missouri River floods include:
- Brinkley writes, "No human will ever master the Mississippi River Delta (nor will the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), as nearly 300 years of flooding attest." The same could be said of the Missouri River before and after the six main-stem dams.
- Regarding the Corps of Engineers' building levees and flood walls to protect New Orleans, Brinkley writes that "the Corps also had to balance itself between the often conflicting interests of parochial Louisiana politicians and federal officials. What the national government ordered and what the locals insisted upon were nearly always different. The Corps itself was pushed and pulled just as much as any of the rivers or bayous that it oversaw." On the Missouri, the Corps of Engineers faces demands from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the Endangered Species Act and its requirements for the pallid sturgeon. It also answers to constituencies who want water held for recreation.
- Brinkley adds that "Because of the extraneous projects and inefficiencies that resulted, by 2005 overseeing a system of levees in New Orleans based on fifty-year-old engineering and suspect construction techniques was taking its toll." The Corps of Engineers has also been stressed on the Missouri; in front of the Omaha Press Club July 21, a Corps official mentioned sleepless nights in referring to Corps flood response work.
- "As a result of the 1927 flood, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started channeling the Mississippi River, which had ugly, unintended consequences," Brinkley writes. One consequence of the channeling of the middle Missouri River is that land which had absorbed floodwaters was outside the channels.
Our society has itself to blame for the Missouri River flooding this year. We should have known the Missouri would cause extreme floods again despite the big dams. Warnings as early as about 170 years ago came from George Catlin, who used the word "terror" to describe the current, which he said flowed from one side of the floodplains to the other.
"Ideally from my viewpoint we would have no development in the flood plain," Jody Farhat of the Corps of Engineers told the Omaha Press Club July 21. Farhat acknowledged that floodplain soil is fertile and "some things need to be there ... but there is residual risk."
Farhat also told the Press Club that "this year we had very high flows in the middle and lower stretches of the Missouri River," and, in reference to heavy rain, "by the time we could have even had a forecast of that rain, it was too late."
Farhat made another point that is common sense: "Much of the river is covered by ice in the winter," when the Corps is "very restricted" in how much water it can release.
"During the early part of the runoff year, we get flooding in the lower river as well, and also we're managing the runoff from snowpack," Farhat said.
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