Record Midwest Floods Threaten Communities with “Walls of Water”

Whats more alarming than this is the fact that everything stops about these floods in June.. and they didn't just disappear! No one is saying anything anymore about it.. The water hasn't receded. There was a video and interactive map on MSNBC that was removed! WHY? So these states just slide on down to the gulf and no one cares?

I think the correct solution is (1) More reforestration in the Missouri River watershed for the purpose of holding back water. (2) More dams in the upper Missouri River to hold back flood waters and produce badly needed hydroelectric power. This is also important to stop and reverse global climate change. (3) Raising the height of all of the levees in the Missouri River and Mississippi watersheds.

Another simple solution is to lower the pools. The reservoirs, or "buckets" described in this essay, could be kept lower in the spring, leaving more room at the top of the dams for spring run-off. It's simple in that it would require no new construction or engineering, just change the March 1 storage target, now at 57 MAF. It's not simple, politically. People all up and down the river have gotten attached to high pools, for all the benefits that the water brings. So lowering the pools would be a very fair solution to flooding below dams, as it would mean shared sacrifice. --Except for navigation, which under current flow regimes would immediately take priority when pools are lower. In order to be fair, nav. should be asked to sacrifice too, with a shorter season, say. It's a travesty and folly over 60 years in the making, that this country has built some of the biggest flood-control dams in the world on the Missouri, yet we still have flooding. We want to have it both ways--flood control yet full pools. The river this year is telling us we need to choose on or the other.

After hearing lots of talk in Omaha about alleged mismanagement of water causing the current flooding of the Missouri River in Nebraska and Iowa, this article seems to make sense. The city confirms it has spent $3.9 million on this flooding so far; has been building since mid-June a large trough on the riverfront to put excess water into the river; and is now constructing wells to protect the airport.

I haven't heard it discussed in this case too much, but I heard an interview on NPR that discussed how the river had been channelized and straightened to more effectively pass flows. While these techniques are effective at moving water quickly downstream, the effect is that one community's (or river reach's) problem flows are handed down the the next community. If a downstream community had also channelized their river, the high flows are quickly conveyed downstream to the next river reach. Eventually, the downstream communities are going to get way too much water too quickly and will experience a disastrous flood event. When we start to over-engineer our rivers, the river cannot respond naturally by storing water in its floodplains and associated wetlands or marshes. As a nation, we need to encourage healthy rivers by restoring our rivers, reclaiming their floodplains, allowing the rivers to become more sinuous so that flood flows are slowed and each river reach can store more flood waters in its floodplains so that no single river reach or community must face the brunt of an entire watershed's high flows. The restoration of our rivers will not only allow our rivers to maintain their adaptive capacity for low and/or high flows, but will also help make our communities more resilient to extreme high and/or low water flows.