"Manmade disaster"

Sounds familiar

Some of those whose homes were inundated have taken to describing the flooding as a "manmade disaster," suggesting the corps moved too slowly to release the water. Waiting too long, politicians and affected residents said, forced the corps to release massive amounts of water in a compact period and the levees stood little chance against it.

Former South Dakota Gov. Bill Janklow has been a vocal critic of the corps' handling of the waterway, calling the agency "slow-witted."

"I just think they are going to waste money," Janklow said Friday. "It's simple; there was too much water when the melt came. And I realize it rained more than they expected. We may have still had floods this year, but they wouldn't have been on the magnitude where we were looking for Noah to build an ark."

Those of us familiar with the degree to which the Mississippi River has been altered by human management and competing human interests will recognize some of the issues being discussed here. Back in July, the New York Times printed this story about the Missouri which explains this a bit more.

Even as (Senator Claire) McCaskill praised the collaboration in fighting flooding, she noted that she and other leaders from both parties in Missouri remained committed to supporting shipping interests on the river. “While navigation is much more important than recreation, we should not let the fight between navigation and recreation get in the way of flood control,” Ms. McCaskill said.

Her colleagues north of the dams have a different view.

“Frankly, navigation never developed as anticipated,” said Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, who called for a revision of how the river was operated. “The basic operational assumptions from the management of the river are really no longer valid.”

Asked about the continued emphasis on navigation despite the sparse traffic, Jody Farhat, the chief of water management for the Missouri River Basin for the Army Corps of Engineers, said: “The primary reason is it’s because it’s the law. The Corps of Engineers does what Congress tells us to do.”

Once wide, shallow and unusually winding, the Missouri River has been drastically reshaped over the last century, at a cost of more than $650 million, to create a channel friendly to modern vessels, according to federal estimates. The result is a narrower, deeper, straighter river, which the government spends about $7 million a year to maintain.

The Mississippi and Missouri River systems (they're really the same system anyway) are so firmly controlled by the Corps of Engineers at the behest of political leaders that any flooding event can only be described as a "manmade disaster." This doesn't mean, as some know-nothing types would suggest, that we're wrong to alter or control the river at all. Only it means that when flooding happens, there are specific policies and persons responsible for it which merit examination.