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Posted: Friday, June 24, 2011 11:55 pm
High on a hill north of Nebraska City, where she and husband Don have lived for 53 years, Pat Ramold is witnessing the worst Missouri River flooding she has ever seen.
From that lofty vantage point, river watchers can see across the river into both Iowa and Missouri.
That explains why as many as 30 cars at a time have clogged the Ramolds' pumpkin patch parking lot in recent days. Those displaced by the flood know they're welcome to come there to train binoculars on the homes they've been forced to leave.
"We've got families who don't have homes anymore, and they never will," the 72-year-old mother of four said.
"I see tears in these people's eyes, I see them scared. Some of these young kids aren't sure what they'll do."
One opinion of the rampaging waters pouring south from bloated reservoirs in Montana and the Dakotas is that it's an act of God.
No way, Ramold said.
"God didn't do this," she said. "This is the corps."
A deluge of finger-pointing
There's no room to argue that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is dealing with a deluge created by heavy rain and melting snow and with finger-pointing from those who think its staff failed to respond promptly enough.
High water thundering out of Gavins Point Dam along the Nebraska border at 160,000 cubic feet per second -- the previous record was 70,000 cfs -- is submerging roads, softening levees, shutting down water treatment plants and turning daily routines into daily torture.
At Omaha, Jody Farhat, the corps' chief of water management, knows frustration and anger won't go away just because the water will go down eventually.
It was heavy rain in May in North Dakota and Montana that threw reservoir management severely out of whack, Farhat said.
"Until the rains in May," said the 28-year corps veteran, "we had no need to evacuate water sooner or at a higher rate than what we had planned."
Putting the blame on the rain doesn't mean she's immune to human suffering.
"It is heart-wrenching to see the impact on local communities," Farhat said, "and our hearts go out to those who are impacted."
Lake McConaughy times 40
Fort Peck in Montana became the corps' first line of dam defense against catastrophic flooding in the 1930s. Five more mainstem dams that were added in the 1950s -- Garrison, Oahe, Big Bend, Fort Randall and Gavins Point -- increased the feeling of security and total reservoir storage to 73.1 million acre-feet.
For Nebraskans more familiar with 22-mile-long Lake McConaughy, the upper Missouri River dams' total size is the equivalent of almost 40 lakes the size of Big Mac.
All that holding capacity makes it hard for Brad Lawrence, director of public works at Fort Pierre, S.D., to understand how things could have gone so wrong.
About 1,000 people, half the population of his small town across the river from South Dakota's capital city, have been forced to evacuate.
"Nobody could believe that we can flood on the Missouri River," he said. "We've got these big dams on the river so that we should be safe."
Lawrence, also prominent in the ranks of South Dakota rural water managers, has become a celebrity of sorts in email and Internet circles for warning, as early as Feb. 3, of the potential for severe flooding on the Missouri in 2011.
He thinks the corps should have ramped up releases and lowered reservoir levels much earlier to prepare for the melting of deep mountain snow, but the first releases from emergency spillways didn't happen until May 6.
"A month of higher discharges ahead of what we've had might have made a difference," he said.
Water rose, spillways stayed closed
A check of the monthly reservoir operations reports for Garrison, Oahe and Fort Peck, the third-, fourth- and fifth-largest reservoirs in the United States, offers some support for Lawrence's view.
By May 1, for example, the water level in Oahe had risen almost 12 feet. Garrison rose by more than 9 feet in March and April as spillway gates remained closed.
Now, suddenly, total water in the six reservoirs is at 72.7 million acre-feet, 600,000 acre-feet above the previous record, reached in 1975. Total capacity is uncomfortably close at 73.1 million acre-feet.
Farhat can do the math. But she also knows that the 16.3 million acre-feet set aside for flood control in the six reservoirs is based on an 1881 flood.
"We certainly plan to examine this year's runoff to see if any changes are indicated," she said. "But I also think it's important to point out that 16.3 million acre-feet has been sufficient for the last 130 years."
That standard is being challenged now by what she described as a "historic event. Our May runoff was 10.5 million acre-feet, more than one and a half times the previous record May runoff."
If Farhat wanted to depend on excuses for how the Missouri got out of control, she has plenty of options.
Winter ice, summer barge traffic, habitat for endangered species, recreational considerations and dam repairs are among the factors that regularly influence decisions about seasonal flows.
But nothing on that list of contingencies affected decisions in 2011, Farhat said.
"The reservoir system had its full flood control capacity available at the start of the flood control season," she said.
Lawrence said the corps should have been paying more attention to the mountain snowpack and to the unusually heavy water content of that snow.
But Farhat said much of the snow didn't fall until April. And the corps routinely measures water content in snow.
"We're certainly getting a lot of folks who would like us to examine this new data point to see if this should lead to changes in our master manual," she said. "And we agree totally with that philosophy. It is a new data point."
In Nebraska City, Ramold watches the river spread out and make a mess of people's lives.
"It looks so docile," she said, "and it's so wicked."
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