Rampaging Missouri River defies its master

Dave Helling and Scott Canon in the Kansas City Star: ...“When your bathtub is full, you just can’t put any more water in it,” said Dave Becker, operations manager for the Army Corps of Engineers at Gavins Point Dam on the Nebraska-South Dakota border. “Water is going to spill over.”
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..But how did the bathtub get so full? Why did the six huge Missouri River reservoirs — Gavins Point is 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 flood gates 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. Consequently, the corps made room in its man-made lakes for the coming runoff. Just not enough. It chose not to make more room, its engineers point out, because it was unaware of the torrents of rain that would deluge the Missouri basin in May. As the river now rises in downtown Kansas City 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 hydro power. 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. All that means storing water in the reservoirs in the spring, not leaving empty space to protect against flooding...

The Gavins Point Dam releases 150,000 cubic feet per second of water June 14, 2011, a record that more than doubles the previous high release. (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo by Jay Woods). Here's a conundrum. US government photos are in the public domain. Yet the Corps released this through Flickr with a license. Go figure