Missouri River Not Cooperating

Eight years out of 10, the 14 flood gates, 40 feet wide, spill not so much as a bucket of the brown water into the Missouri River.

Now enough is barreling out of Lewis & Clark Lake to cover a football field 3½ feet deep every second. Water will race through the dam at that record rate, ultimately swamping farms and towns for hundreds of miles downstream, through August.

“When your bathtub is full, you just can’t put any more water in it,” said Dave Becker, the operations manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Gavins Point. “Water is going to spill over.”

But how did the bathtub get so full? Why did the six huge Missouri River reservoirs — Gavins Point is the farthest downstream — fill to the brim and force the months-long release of floodwater?

The short answer: The corps could have prevented or drastically held down flooding by opening flood gates sooner. The reasons it didn’t — reasons putting government water managers on the spot this summer — rest in a tangle of history, physics, meteorology and politics.

We had ample warning last winter that snow was piling on the Rockies. Consequently, the corps made room in its man-made lakes for the coming runoff. Just not enough.

It chose not to make more room, its engineers point out, because it was unaware of the torrents of rain that would deluge the Missouri basin in May. As the river now rises in downtown Kansas City and floods soybean fields and hamlets to the north, the corps insists it couldn’t have predicted those storms.

The agency also says it was simply following orders — from us. Over lifetimes and through our politicians, we’ve said we don’t just want those dams to protect us against cataclysm.

NOTE: Excellent, it's "our" fault they didn't release the water soon enough, but were kind enough to offer to buy the flooded farm land, Hmmmm