Riverdale - The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened Garrison Dam more than 56 years ago - the two-and-a-half mile-wide centerpiece of a plan to tame the mighty Missouri River.
This year's record flooding, which forced the Corps for the first time to open the dam's colossal emergency spillway and launch a months-long flood fight stretching over 1,700 of the river's 2,300 miles, has many people questioning whether the Corps remains in control of the river.
"We've had highs and lows in the past, but we've never had the highs like we've got with the flooding now," said Terry Focke, 63 years old, a fishing guide in nearby Pick City, N.D., for 20 years. He said his business is off 70% this year because high water has closed every boat ramp within 100 miles.
This year's deluge is also forcing a rethink of decades-old ways of battling floods on the Mississippi, Missouri and other major U.S. rivers.
On the Mississippi, the Corps is looking at a $1 billion-$2 billion repair bill to restore levees, floodways and river-navigation features that faced their biggest test since the current flood-control system was designed in the late 1920s.
Engineers are also assessing whether they need to make changes to the system, such as adding a new floodway - an area set aside for agriculture or other uses that can also be used as a relief valve when flooding is severe.
For the Missouri, a management plan passed by Congress in 1944 and adjusted by later court decisions could be re-examined as the Corps tries to figure out what went wrong. The four U.S. senators from North Dakota and Missouri this week formed a working group to look into issues related to the big flood.
"This is an extreme event in terms of hydrology and the historic record - an act of nature that has overwhelmed the system," said Witt Anderson, the senior civilian in the Corps's Northwestern Division, which oversees the Missouri. "It is new information that we're going to have to take into account as we go forward."
Following unusually heavy rains in Montana and North Dakota in mid-May, and with Rocky Mountain snowpack still melting, the Corps is draining its six Missouri reservoirs and sending that water downstream at more than twice the previous record rate.
Towns from Montana to Missouri have spent millions of dollars beefing up or building levees to handle high water expected to last well into August. Thousands of people have evacuated communities long considered safe. Rural levees in Nebraska and Missouri have been breached, flooding thousands of acres of farmland.
Anger at the Corps is bubbling up all along the river.
"If somebody doesn't lose their job over this, there's a problem," said farmer Mike Guenthner of Underwood, N.D., who said high water was forcing him to move his irrigation pumps to higher ground.
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In Blair, Neb., Mayor James Realph said his city's water treatment plant, which is essential to keeping open a biofuels complex that employs 1,000 people, is threatened by the flooding. "Whatever else the dams were supposed to do, we've gotten away from their primary purpose" of flood control, he said.
The Corps said that its only concern this year has been flood control.
By law, the Corps allocates precise amounts of storage capacity in its reservoirs for flood control, navigation, water quality, irrigation, hydropower, recreation, water supply and fish and wildlife.
Following heavy rains last year, however, the Corps said it started 2011 with little margin for error because reservoirs had exactly the amount of space normally allocated for flood control, but no more. When the big rains hit in May, the reservoirs filled, leaving the Corps scrambling to free up space for weeks of snowmelt from the mountains.
Any change in the Corps's operating plan could spark legislative or court fights pitting the Dakotas and Montana, home to the reservoirs and a strong recreational industry, against Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri, where shipping and agricultural interests predominate.
Many critics say the barge industry should have to give up some of the extra water it requires in summer to keep the shipping lanes open. To accommodate the shippers, the Corps over many years remade the lower Missouri from a shallow, wide riverbed into a narrow, deeper channel.
But barge traffic hasn't lived up to the Corps' expectations, said Robert Schneiders, an environmental historian who has written two books about the river. "They took a Field of Dreams approach," he said. "And the traffic never materialized."
Shippers are likely to put up a fierce fight for the water, noting the fuel efficiency and long-term potential of the industry.
"We're trying to grow food for the country," said Kevin Holcer, marketing and distribution manager for AGRIServices of Brunswick LLC, Mo., a fertilizer and grain company that is also one of the only barge operators on the river.
"If those people think they can grow enough fish [in the reservoirs] to survive on, maybe that is more important," Mr. Holcer said.
The Environmental Defense Fund has been complaining about river "flood control" projects since I was getting their newsletters in the late 1970's! Apparently their voice of reason was "drowned" out by some louder voice. The voice of corporate profit, perhaps?
Who benefits from super-controlled channelized rivers that "never" flood? Agribusiness? Home builders? It must be somebody.
A problem with EDF's arguments was that they concentrated on the plants and animals. They didn't mention people too much. We are given to believe that the "people" find periodic flooding of their rivers a big annoyance. Apparently the Army Corps has reacted to that sentiment by channelizing and damming these rivers. And so people got complacent, thinking the Army Corps had everything under control.
Those houses that flooded in Minot were RIGHT NEXT to the river! No one should have any business building housing so close to a river.
So this misplaced faith in the Army Corps and their arrogant approach to river control has finally turned on us. But will the people who make the decisions see through to the central fallacy on which the Corp's philosophy of river control is built? Or will they accept contrite apologies and go on to support the Corp's next grand scheme to make it all work?
A sane person, and a sane society, knows how to learn from its mistakes. Is our society still sane enough to do so?