© Rich Sugg
"Ooh, man. Ooh." Schaeffer followed and looked down in disbelief. A riot of water roiled where he'd spent a lifetime of lazy fishing.
"I've never seen anything like it," he said. "Nothing even close."
Eight years out of 10, the 14 flood gates, 40 feet wide, spill not so much as a bucket of the brown water into the Missouri River.
Now enough is barreling out of Lewis & Clark Lake to cover a football field 3½ feet deep every second. Water will race through the dam at that record rate, ultimately swamping farms and towns for hundreds of miles downstream, through August.
"When your bathtub is full, you just can't put any more water in it," said Dave Becker, the operations manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Gavins Point. "Water is going to spill over."
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.
