Neither God, nor freak rain events, or the tiny piping plover caused the Missouri River flood of 2011. Rather, humans, and their ignorance, greed, and hubris, brought the floodwaters down upon this area.
The Army Corps deserves much of the blame for the flood. The Army kept the Montana and Dakota reservoirs high when the impoundments should have been low. Consequently, the reservoirs did not have enough storage space to capture the descending super flood. To prevent the dams from being overtopped and washed away, the Army released unprecedented amounts of water from Gavin’s Point Dam. Continue Reading »
“So completely has the whole State passed beneath the plow, so quickly assumed the appearance of one vast farm, that one who thus studies the Iowa of to-day realizes with difficulty the strange picturesque wildness of fifty or sixty years ago…. The whole flora of the prairie went down to rise no more, to give place to plants of man’s selecting and to weeds…. Hosts of alien species occupied the ground.” – Thomas Macbridge, 1895 [Quote from Cornelia F. Mutel, "The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa," Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008, p.75.]
Iowa once held a reputation for being a top pheasant hunting state. In 1962, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) estimated that bird numbers throughout the state stood at 65.9 pheasants per 30-mile brood survey route. High pheasant populations resulted from ample habitat. Birds found nesting sites, cover, and concealment in stands of timber and brush growing along fence rows or next to farm houses, in cattails encircling wetlands, and in the un-mowed ditches straddling public highways and dirt roads. Good habitat enabled pheasants to survive Iowa’s occasionally brutal winters.
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Tagged Conservation Reserve Program, Iowa Corn Growers Association, Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Iowa Pheasant Hunting, Iowa Pheasant Outlook, Iowa Pheasant Population, Iowa Pheasant Population 2011, South Dakota Corn Growers Association, South Dakota Pheasant Hunting, South Dakota Pheasant Outlook, South Dakota Pheasant Population, South Dakota Pheasant Population 2011, South Dakota Pheasants
This year, the Missouri defeated the sophisticated and expensive hydraulic system built to contain it. Neither the Army’s gigantic earthen dams, high levees, nor its thousands of pile dikes and revetments could stop the Missouri from inundating its valley from Montana south to the state of Missouri. This is not the first time the Missouri has confounded the efforts of the Army to control it. As a matter of fact, the river has defied the federal engineers since the nineteenth century – and it will do so again. It is why the Missouri is known as the “Mighty Mo.” Continue Reading »
From 1929 to 1940, the Great Plains experienced a devastating drought. Scorching temperatures, an over-abundance of sunshine, and dry winds ravaged the land. From the Dakotas to Texas, soils turned to powder and blew away. In those hard, lean years, plains residents experienced hundreds of deadly dust storms. The Black Blizzards threw billowing clouds of dirt into the atmosphere, blotted out the sun, suffocated stock animals, and inflicted a phenomenon known as dust pneumonia on the rural population. Untold numbers died from the respiratory ailment. Continue Reading »
Placing responsibility for the Great Missouri River Flood of 2011 on God ignores all of the ways humans have contributed to the disaster. It also absolves those partially responsible for the flood. Even worse, it hinders us from learning from the flood so that we can prevent a similar scenario in the future. Off the top of my head, I can think of five ways humans brought on this flood.
First, the Missouri basin states have lost millions of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) acres in the past five years. CRP lands had either slowed or halted runoff into streams and rivers. Encouraged by high commodity prices, plains and prairie farmers engaged in a Great Plow-up that converted sod to corn. Montana lost nearly 400,000 acres of CRP land between 2006 and 2010. That equals 625 square miles. The two Dakotas and Montana lost 960,000 CRP acres in 2007 and another 335,000 CRP acres in 2008. That land area is equivalent to 2,023 square miles. Even more conservation land went into corn in 2009, 2010, and during this year’s planting season. As a result of the Great Plow-up, drenching rains now hit cultivated cropland and quickly drain into the Missouri or one of its feeder streams. Farmers, and their desire to maximize production and profit, contributed mightily to this flood. Continue Reading »
Tagged Army Corps of Engineers, Bismarck, Conservation Reserve Program, Dakota Dunes, Gavin's Point Dam, Iowa, Missouri River Flood, Missouri River Flood 2011, Missouri River Flooding, Missouri River Navigation Channel, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oahe, Ponca, Sioux City
