Adam’s Prairie Preserve, McCook Lake, South Dakota. The Missouri, which normally flows beyond the southern border of the preserve, has moved onto the preserve itself, sinking a string of timber tracts situated along the sanctuary’s lower end. The inundation of the forestlands has forced wildlife, such as turkeys, raccoons, and deer to seek safety on higher ground. This evening a herd of nearly 30 deer mingled next to the engorged river. A half mile south of the deer, the Missouri could be seen passing through tall cottonwood trees. I wondered whether this herd had once made its home amongst those trees. Usually deer bunch-up at food plots and in refuges during the bitter cold winter months to feed on the limited forage and to avoid the multitudes of orange-clad hunters prowling the countryside. It is odd to see such a big herd during the heat and humidity of high summer. In all likelihood, the flood has put the animals to flight and has forced them to congregate in a large herd. The inundation of so much riverside habitat will put intensified animal pressure on the remaining habitat in the valley. Continue Reading »
Notes from the Field, June 16, 2011, River Hammers Channelization Works
Sioux City, Iowa. On Wednesday, June 15, 2011, “Sioux City Journal” photographer Tim Hynds shot an aerial photo of the Port Neal power plant along the Missouri River west of Salix, Iowa. The image, which appeared in the June 16, 2011, edition of the “Journal,” on page A8 shows the rising Missouri as it flows past the facility. What’s notable about the picture isn’t its portrayal of the engorged river threatening Port Neal. Rather, what makes this such a memorable photograph is its depiction of the Army’s pile dikes just upstream from the electrical-generating plant. Hynds’ photo clearly shows a series of pile dikes in the center of the Missouri River. The pile dikes are not supposed to be in the center of the river! Continue Reading »
Great Missouri River Flood of 2011: Made Worse by the Army’s Navigation Channel
Since the nineteenth century, the Army has built 8,300 “training structures” along the Missouri from Ponca, Nebraska, to the river’s mouth, a distance of 753 river miles. The flooding along the lower Missouri River this summer is going to be made worse by those Army channelization works.
In the late nineteenth century, railroad companies monopolized transportation into and out of the Missouri Valley. Farmers in the valley and businessmen in Kansas City, St. Joseph, Omaha, and Sioux City sought to break that monopoly by creating an alternate transportation route along the Missouri River. To compete with the railroad companies, the Missouri had to carry deep-draft barges. Only barges, with their large holds, could conceivably haul cargo at lower rates than the exploitative railroads. But there were problems with the Missouri. It possessed an average depth of three feet (too shallow for barge traffic), it meandered willy nilly across its valley floor (creating navigational obstacles in the form of sandbars and shoals), and it filled its channel with snags during its annual April and June rises (as floodwaters cut into the river’s banks). To make a barge channel in the river, the Army concluded that the Missouri had to be remade into something altogether different. It had to be deepened to six feet and later nine feet; its meandering had to come to an end; and it had to be made to flow so fast that snags (which posed a threat to river vessels) could not plant themselves in the Missouri’s sandy bed. To initiate those changes, the Army began channelizing the river in 1881, utilizing pile dikes (known today as wingdams) and revetments. Continue Reading »
