South Dakota, US: Flood-Weary Cities Face Uneasy Future

Next up: Remove levees, reinforce long-term protection

At some point, record rain and snowmelt coursing down the Missouri River will taper off, and communities such as Pierre, Fort Pierre and Dakota Dunes will take down emergency levees flung up more than a month ago to protect them from floods.

And then they will ask: Now what?

But that question is only the beginning of a series of challenges leaders will be looking to address. Among other questions:

• Who will pay for removing the levees?
• What will it cost to rehabilitate streets battered by construction vehicles and utilities shut down and sandbagged against flooding?
• Will the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers adjust its management of the river to move more water downstream earlier in the spring in unusually wet years such as this one?
• And perhaps most important, will there be another year like this one? If the record wet conditions of this year threaten to become a recurring event, does South Dakota need more permanent flood protection?

Community leaders still are dealing with the day-to-day issues of fending off a flood threat that began in May. For example, volunteers met at the Clay County courthouse Wednesday to replenish a store of sandbags. Gov. Dennis Daugaard has issued a no-boating order on the Vermillion River from the Highway 50 bypass to the confluence with the Missouri. And as the corps seeks to ease the immense amount of water downstream, Lake Francis Case behind the Fort Randall Dam has risen to record heights.

But leaders also are beginning to think about the future.

"We're starting to look at what is facing us in the next months and years in Pierre," Mayor Laurie Gill said. In consultation with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, city officials have set up a system to track the short-term cost and to estimate the long-term cost to the community of dealing with the emergency.

"Our initial take is this is at least a $13 million event for us," the mayor said. Flood recovery is going to have to be balanced against the city's typical strategic planning for capital and other needs.

"Obviously, we are going to have to redo our list,"Gill said. "I am going to be sworn in next week for a new three-year term. I anticipate I'll be working on flood issues the next three years."

In Pierre, much of the levee system is built atop streets. In Dakota Dunes, levees cross streets, snake through yards and rise abruptly from golf course fairways.

"It's certainly in the back of our mind what to do with it," Jeff Dooley, head of the Community Improvement District, said of the levee system there.

Dependent on the Corps

He predicts that at least some of the levees protecting Dakota Dunes will become permanent. But complicating the decision of where to build levees and how high to build them is the corps' long-term decisions for managing the Missouri, Dooley said.

Where the river is concerned, the corps hardly works quickly. Sarah Gross, a corps spokeswoman, noted the process by which the master manual guiding river management last was revised in 2004.

"It was 14 years in the making," she said, "with plenty of public input."

Under current regulations, emergency levees built by the corps are required to be removed.

"After a flood event, the local levee sponsors are sent a letter that instructs them to report any flood damage within 30 days of the date of the letter, so that it can be assessed by the corps," said Dick Taylor, operations manager for the corps' Missouri River Management Office. "Temporary structures constructed by the corps under our emergency authorities are temporary and are to be removed after the flood event."

But Sen. John Thune said he detects a new willingness among corps leaders such as Northwestern Division Commander Brig. Gen. John McMahon to expedite changes to the master manual and to amend rules such as the one governing levee removal.
Counting on flexible corps

"We hear they are more willing to work with states and communities to make changes in the law to work with communities to maintain them, if that's what they decide to do," Thune said of the corps' approach to levees.

Because seven states, from Montana to Missouri, are affected by the river, Thune said he thinks a sense of urgency will continue to be stoked to change river management to better cope with flood conditions.

This issue isn't likely to fade away in the fall when the water goes down, he said.

Wetter Climate Long-Term

Adding to the corps' willingness to consider bold management changes to reduce potential flooding danger is a growing concern that this wet year might not be unique, Thune said.

Among corps officials, "there's a pretty intense focus, knowing full well it might just be a matter of months before they're looking at this again," Thune said.

"It shapes the thinking a little differently."

South Dakota climatologist Dennis Todey echoes that. He said climate models suggest the region drained by the Missouri River is becoming wetter.

"Even during the dry periods of the early 2000s, there was a trend toward more precipitation" than during the previous great drought of the 1930s, Todey said.

"The multimillion dollar question is how long is this going to last?" Todey added.

Climate models are not perfect at forecasting, and improvements to those models are made incrementally, Todey said.

"We're not going to wake up one day and say, 'Oh, we've got this completely figured out,' " he said.

That's not helpful to federal, state and local agencies planning at various tempos to manage flooding.

At the broadest, slowest-moving level, the corps and federal officials are trying to understand climate trends so they can make decadeslong decisions about how the river should flow.

At the narrowest, quickest-moving level, communities are trying to decide what they are going to do about the river next month and next year.

"Planning occurs at all scales," Todey pointed out.

As Dooley at Dakota Dunes observes, "until we know some of this stuff, it's hard to make a determination" about building permanent levees. But, "I am envisioning there will come a time when we say, 'Here's our plan; let's execute it.' "