Floods of 2019: The rise, the river and the recovery
An in-depth look at the historic flooding along the Missouri River has caused billions of dollars in damage and devastated entire communities.
An in-depth look at the historic flooding along the Missouri River has caused billions of dollars in damage and devastated entire communities.
An in-depth look at the historic flooding along the Missouri River has caused billions of dollars in damage and devastated entire communities.
Part 1: The Rise
Holt County Commissioner Tom Bullock was sworn into his new post in January of 2019. Two months later, the Missouri River over-topped every levee in his county, flooding countless farms and homes. Now a full 10 months into his term, Bullock’s home and hundreds of others are still surrounded by floodwaters.
“It just makes me sick every time I see it,” he said as he looked down the flooded road that leads to his home. He moved out on March 15 and most of the year has only been able to return by boat.
Bullock’s county, like several between Omaha and Kansas City, is in crisis.
“This county alone, there’s right around 90,000 acres that didn’t get planted because it was underwater,” he said. “That’s a big loss to this county. That’s a big loss to farmers.”
There’s still no exact price tag on how much damage the historic floods of 2019 have caused, but estimates have easily reached into the billions. It’s still difficult to assess the damage. Water still covers thousands of acres in Holt County, making repairs to critical levees all but impossible in some places.
“The Corps has already told us nothing is going to get fixed here until next year, so we’re pretty much looking at the same thing next spring,” said Bullock, referencing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the branch of the federal government charged with managing the Missouri River.
The recipe that created the floods of 2019 began last year. An extremely wet and snowy September and October 2018 left the soil saturated as ground froze along the river. Then in March, a “bomb” went off.
An early March weather event dubbed the “bomb-cyclone” dumped up to 3 feet of snow on the ground in some areas, and over the course of the next several days, temperatures soared into the 60s. That rapid melt, combined with several more inches of rain across the Midwest, sent water rushing over frozen ground that couldn’t absorb it. All that water dumped into local streams and rivers. Some of the rivers, like the Niobrara, a Missouri River tributary, were still frozen. The water broke up the ice and created massive ice jams that raced down stream.
For the 92-year-old Spencer Dam in Nebraska, it was too much.
“Looked like the end of the world was coming,” said Niobrara, Nebraska, City Clerk Ester Nielsen.
The dam broke, sending an 11-foot wall of water downstream to the city of Niobrara and the mouth of the Missouri River, destroying everything in its path. The influx of water continued into the Missouri, busting levees and causing floods all the way to St. Louis.
Mother Nature has refused to cooperate since then, sending record rainfall into the Missouri River Basin for most of the spring and summer with no relief in sight. The National Weather Service is predicting higher-than-average snowfall across the basin again this winter.
“We’re set up for a disaster again next spring,” said Bullock.
For years, there have been questions about how the Corps of Engineers manages the Missouri River. Now, Bullock and those affected want answers. Could the Corps have done anything to stop these devastating floods?
“It worked well for a long time, but it’s not working anymore,” said Bullock. “We just have regular floods one right after the other now.”
Those questions led us to South Dakota and the Gavins Point Dam, the last dam on the Missouri River operated by the Corps of Engineers.
Part 2: The River
The Missouri River a few hundred miles north of Kansas City looks a lot different.
The Gavins Point Dam in South Dakota is the last dam on the Missouri River as it continues its flow south and east toward Omaha, Kansas City and eventually St. Louis.
Gavins Point is one of six dams built and controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Most were built after Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1944, also known as the Pick-Sloan plan. The plan was put in place to help stop the devastating cycle of floods and droughts for communities along the Missouri River Basin.
At Gavins Point, the Corps is releasing water at about 80,000 cubic feet per second, more than double the average for this time of year.
Which is one reason why people downstream are still dealing with flooding.
"This happened because they opened the dams up there and flooded us," said Bullock. "It wouldn't be here right now if those dams weren't open to 80,000."
Bullock says things were just starting to dry out in his county and the high releases from the dam flooded the ground again.
But those in charge of managing the flow of water says they have to get the water out of the reservoirs behind the dams to get ready for next spring. And that has to be done before the river ices over.
"We really need to get most of that evacuated by the first week - week and a half - of December," said John Remus, chief of the Corps' Missouri River Basin Water Management office. "We don’t want to cause an ice breakup or an ice jam because once you have that you’re kind of done until mother nature melts the ice in the spring. Which really increases the flood risk for everybody."
Releases will remain at 80,000 cubic feet per second through at least the rest of November. The Corps target goal is to drain out enough water to hit their yearly target. The goal is to have 16.3 million acre feet of storage in the reservoirs to hold runoff in the spring to prevent more flooding.
Flood control operations like these are one of eight congressionally authorized purposes for the Corps of Engineers. Critics say the Corps' work on the other purposes like wildlife and recreation have contributed to floods.
"So much of it has been how the Corps has been managing the river," said Rep. Sam Graves, R-Missouri. "We'e causing billions of dollars' worth of damage."
Graves, a vocal opponent of the Corps, filed legislation again this year that would take out fish and wildlife management from the authorized purposes. That bill hasn't gotten a hearing in previous years and it probably won't this year either.
"It’s not really a Democrat and Republican thing," said Graves. "It’s more of a regional thing. So, those of us that live along the Missouri River and have to deal with this over and over again are very much in favor of changing that. Now, if you go way up high above the reservoirs they don’t want to change it. They want to keep those levels high in the reservoirs because of the tourism and fishing industry and that sort of thing."
In 2018, a federal judge agreed the Corps changes in management did contribute to some floods. A group of hundreds of landowners along the river filed suit in 2014, arguing the Corps' actions had violated the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment that bars the government from taking property without compensation.
Senior Judge Nancy Firestone with the United States Court of Federal Claims wrote in her opinion changes made to the river "had the effect of raising the Missouri River’s water surface elevations in periods of high flows."
The Corps won't comment on that suit, but they will defend their actions this year, saying there's little they could have done differently to stop flooding after a record-setting amount of water kept flowing into the river.
"This flood really exceeded our design capacity," said Remus.
Corps leaders also say their decisions now are based solely on flood control because of their concerns that 2020 may bring even more significant and historic floods to the river basin.
"I am very concerned that next year may be bad," said Remus. "I don't want to alarm anybody or anybody to hit the panic button, but the basin is set up to have a lot of runoff."
Part 3: The Recovery
Massive construction sites that stretch for miles are a common site along the Missouri River this fall, after flood waters over-topped or breached nearly every levee between Omaha and Kansas City this spring. The work to repair the broken system is underway, but may take years to complete.
"Where we’re standing right now there was originally about a 70-foot hole that was created from all the flood events that happened back in March," said Corina Zhang, a resident engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as she explains the damage to the L-550 levee system near Watson, Mo.
This levee system had two massive holes in that let flood water flow freely through thousands of acres and onto I-29. That's what made this a priority breach repair for the Corps of Engineers. But even priority repairs have been hindered by continual high water in the river. Water is still lapping against this levee as crews work to patch the hole.
"Some of the challenges this makes is the safety issue – making sure our equipment operates in a safe manner – that folks aren’t gonna go over the sides," said Zhang. "Also, just in terms of how we approach the closure. You can only work on one side. You can’t throw resources over to the other side."
Temperatures have already been below freezing several days in the past couple weeks and if flood waters freeze against a broken levee, it could halt the already slow process.
"As we go into the winter we’re gonna think about how we are going to further protect the system," said Zhang.
The scale of damage to these crucial levees has far surpassed the damage of the historic 2011 floods. In the Kansas City District of the Corps alone there are 163 breaches in 45 different levee systems. The Corps estimates around 1,000 miles of levees have been damaged along the entire Missouri River and its tributaries. The projected repair costs have already exceeded $1 billion, but some levees have remained underwater almost all year making them impossible to inspect.
At the L-550 levee near Watson, local farmers are now operating bulldozers instead of combines this fall. Most, like Todd Moyer, were unable to plant this year.
"Well we have crop insurance so we’re covered for this year and next, if need be," said Moyer, who owns about 160 acres of ground near the area. "After that we’re not covered."
Moyer says the continual cycle of floods have run a lot of his friends off this fertile bottom ground and the next flood will run him out too.
"This is my last one this will be my last one," said Moyer. "I won’t put my wife and kids through this crap no more. I’ll do it one more time. I’ll clean it up but this is it."
The unfortunate reality Moyer and everyone else along the Missouri River already knows, is that next big flood could be coming again in the spring.