In late July 2011, Brigadier General John McMahon, (who oversees the entire Missouri River) decided not to lower the Missouri River reservoirs below the traditional base level of 56.8 million acre feet (MAF) at the start of next year’s runoff season. That base level only frees up 22% of the reservoir system’s storage capacity. In 2011, the Army began the runoff season at that level. We now know that level did not provide enough storage space to capture this year’s flood.
For months, McMahon insisted on maintaining the status quo in the operation of the reservoirs. He likely held firm to this position because he had the backing of the majority of the basin’s senators and other government representatives. Those officials almost certainly recognized that a lower reservoir system base level threatened the monetary benefits of the Army’s hydraulic system. Less water behind the big dams in 2012 would mean fewer financial benefits derived from hydropower generation, Missouri and Mississippi River navigation, reservoir recreation, and the apportionment of water to downstream municipalities and power plants. Continue Reading »
During the construction of the Missouri River navigation channel, the Army erected thousands of pile dikes and revetments to narrow, deepen, and straighten the wide, shallow, meandering stream. Once the engineering works went into the river, the Missouri deposited its heavy silt-load on the downstream side of the structures. Overtime, new, elevated lands appeared in the river’s floodplain. Side channels, marshlands, and scour holes – everything that constituted the floodplain – filled with alluvium. Accumulated sediments sharply reduced the floodplain’s ability to store floodwater. Valley farmers benefitted from the newly accreted land. They expanded their operations into the floodplain, planting row crops where native vegetation once grew. The floodplain’s loss meant the farmer’s monetary gain.
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On Thursday, November 3, 2011, members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers met with the public in Sioux City, Iowa, to discuss the flood of 2011 and the management of the Missouri River in the months ahead. The public finally had a chance to vent its anger at the object of its long-held scorn – and vent it did. When the clean-cut, straight-laced Brigadier General John McMahon took the podium and told the surly crowd that he continued to have full confidence in the skills and abilities of his Missouri River reservoir operations staff – the same staff that determined the reservoir release schedule this past spring with such disastrous results – the audience erupted in a cacophony of catcalls and boos. But the general, who appeared in front of the throngs in his battle dress uniform, stared back at the seething mass of humanity and repeated the statement a second time – to more boos and sighs. Continue Reading »
This fall, the Corps of Engineers is holding a series of meetings along the Missouri Valley to promote its interpretation of the flood of 2011 and to take questions from the public regarding the Army’s management of its Missouri River hydraulic system.
Since late May, Brigadier General John McMahon, Colonel Robert Ruch, and Jody Farhat have advanced a very specific interpretation of the flood, which contends: the flood was too voluminous to contain; the huge discharges from Gavin’s Point Dam resulted from freak rain events in Montana in May; the Army made no mistakes in its management of the Missouri River hydraulic system in the months preceding the deluge; and since 2010, the operation of the reservoirs for flood control trumped the seven other authorized purposes of the hydraulic system (including the storage of water for the navigation channel and hydroelectric generation). McMahon, Ruch, and Farhat have not strayed from the above storyline. Nor have any of them admitted that the Army holds any responsibility at all for the flood. Continue Reading »
