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As Missouri floods, anger spills over at Army Corps

YANKTON, S.D. — Gary Schaeffer's grandkids ran to an overlook of Gavins Point Dam.

"Ooh, man. Ooh."

Schaeffer followed and looked down in disbelief. A riot of water roiled where he'd spent a lifetime of lazy fishing.

"I've never seen anything like it," he said. "Nothing even close."

Eight years out of a decade, 1,440-foot-wide floodgates spill not so much as a bucket of the brown water into the Missouri River.

Now, with the Missouri flooding at record levels over the past two months, enough is barreling out of Lewis and Clark Lake to cover a football field three-and-a-half 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 — including Gavins Point, 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 floodgates 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. The Corps made room in its man-made lakes for the coming runoff. Just not enough.

Its engineers point out that the Corps was unaware of the torrents of rain that would deluge the Missouri basin in May. As the river now rises in downtown Kansas City, Mo., 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.

We want cheap electricity, and the system gives us plenty of hydropower.

The sparsely populated Dakotas want to keep the reservoirs close to full to draw boaters and sports fishermen, and to irrigate the lower reaches of their river valleys.

Downstream, farming interests want enough water to keep the Missouri River barge industry — a steadily shrinking business — alive.

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