After Devastating Floods, Debate Over Mission of the Missouri Rolls
On
New York Times
23 July 2011
By A. G. Sulzberger
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The meandering path of the Missouri River, charted
by Lewis and Clark, once served as the main travel artery across the
Great Plains, carrying people and goods between the comforts of St.
Louis and the wilds of the Montana territory.
But as railroads and highways replaced the river as the preferred
shipping routes, barge traffic dried up so much that some ports have
gone years without seeing a single one. And now the river is dividing
the region that it had stitched together with each of its oxbow bends.
The record flooding this summer along the Missouri River has
overwhelmed dams and levees, swamped small communities and forced large
cities into emergency measures to hold the water back. And so the
pressing matter of how to manage flooding on the Missouri has added a
new urgency to the contentious question that has long nagged this
region: What precisely is this river for?
In a normal year, the water that is used to keep the river level high
enough for barges comes from releases from the dam system built to
control river flow. But the states north of the dams, including North
and South Dakota, have argued that the river is no longer needed for
navigation and that more water should be kept in the reservoirs for
recreation, to help the region’s economy.
The summer-long flood brought promises of renewed cooperation after
years of legal and legislative battles. Senator Claire McCaskill,
Democrat of Missouri, said a recent meeting of a group of senators to
examine how the waterway was managed represented “a high point, pardon
the expression, for cooperation for states along the Missouri River.”
But these leaders have not yet breached the underlying concerns about
how the federal government manages the water.
Earlier this year, the Missouri Congressional delegation succeeded in
stripping financing, after more than $7 million had been spent, from a
study of the priorities for river management that was supported by
upriver states, arguing that it was redundant and amounted to an attack
on navigation.
Even as Ms. McCaskill praised the collaboration in fighting flooding,
she noted that she and other leaders from both parties in Missouri
remained committed to supporting shipping interests on the river.
“While navigation is much more important than recreation, we should not
let the fight between navigation and recreation get in the way of flood
control,” Ms. McCaskill said.
Her colleagues north of the dams have a different view.
“Frankly, navigation never developed as anticipated,” said Senator Kent
Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, who called for a revision of how the
river was operated. “The basic operational assumptions from the
management of the river are really no longer valid.”
Asked about the continued emphasis on navigation despite the sparse
traffic, Jody Farhat, the chief of water management for the Missouri
River Basin for the Army Corps of Engineers, said: “The primary reason
is it’s because it’s the law. The Corps of Engineers does what Congress
tells us to do.”
Once wide, shallow and unusually winding, the Missouri River has been
drastically reshaped over the last century, at a cost of more than $650
million, to create a channel friendly to modern vessels, according to
federal estimates. The result is a narrower, deeper, straighter river,
which the government spends about $7 million a year to maintain.
The predictions for boat traffic that were used to justify the spending
never materialized. The amount and value of river freight has actually
declined sharply since the late 1970s, a few years before the project
was finally completed, according to federal data.
Though the river cuts through the heart of farm country, almost no
grain is transported on the Missouri — 4.8 million of the 5 million
tons of cargo moved by barge last year was sand and gravel, which was
usually shipped less than a mile. Traffic upriver from Kansas City all
but disappeared.
“They’ve had decades to prove this is worth the expenditure of taxpayer
dollars,” said Andrew Fahlund, a vice president for conservation at
American Rivers, a conservation organization that has sued over the
management of the river.
Even the shipping company of Roger Blaske, whose great-grandfather and
every generation since have plied these waters, was one of several on
the river to close after years of drought made business even more
unpredictable. He was unsure if it would ever again be profitable to
work on the waterway.
“I guess it could be,” Mr. Blaske said with a heavy sigh. “It was at
one time.”
Some leaders maintain that the industry will revive. In St. Joseph,
Mo., where just two barges have visited in the decade since the
construction of a $1.3 million port, city leaders insist that the river
is still viable as a commerce route.
Just downriver in Kansas City, leaders are looking into reopening a
port, with the head of the effort saying he hoped upriver states would
not “choke off the opportunity for people below.” And the State of
Missouri received $900,000 in federal money to examine how to get more
freight on the river.
“The highways are congested, the railways are headed that way, the
waterways have capacity,” said Ernest Perry, the freight development
administrator for the Missouri transportation department.
Other rivers have shown that shipping can still be viable. Though
slower than other forms of transit, river barges are able to carry far
larger quantities at a lower cost. Even with aging infrastructure on
many major shipping routes — and despite the widespread flooding this
year — the business as a whole remains healthy, industry leaders say.
But the Missouri can accommodate fewer barges because of the strong
current and sharper bends. And though navigation, along with flood
control, gets priority for releases of water from dams, the
unpredictable river levels have made shipping contracts riskier.
The most substantial contribution to navigation that the river makes is
supplying water to the far busier Mississippi, into which the Missouri
empties just north of St. Louis.
Kevin Holcer, a manager for AGRIServices, a Missouri company that sells
fertilizer and other agricultural products, said that when the shipping
operations they worked with went out of business, the company bought
its own tugboat.
“We’re really the only one on the Missouri that’s out here every day
for hire,” he said. The current flood shut down river traffic and has
caused substantial losses, he added.
Officials with the Army Corps of Engineers have said that the reservoir
levels were drawn down to “full flood capacity,” when rain unexpectedly
filled the space set aside for snowmelt — forcing the dams to release
more water than ever before. Various parties have suggested that more
water than necessary was being held back. Corps leaders acknowledge the
tension between vacating water for a flood and holding it for other
use, but maintain that the guidelines never anticipated a flood of this
size.
That defense has not assuaged Gov. Terry E. Branstad of Iowa, a
Republican, who has strongly criticized the Corps of Engineers for not
releasing more water sooner. He said he believed that the other uses,
like navigation and recreation, distracted from the focus on flood
control.
“They’ve lost their way,” Mr. Branstad said. “They’re not doing what
the dams were designed to do in the first place. As a result, we’ve
suffered significant losses.”