Guest post by Alec Rawls
That’s the eye-popping thesis suggested by Joe Herring at American Thinker, and his prima facie evidence, while thin, is also hard to get around. The key fact is this:
On February 3, 2011, a series of e-mails from Ft. Pierre SD Director of Public Works Brad Lawrence sounded the alarm loud and clear. In correspondence to the headquarters of the American Water Works Association in Washington, D.C., Lawrence warned that “the Corps of Engineers has failed thus far to evacuate enough water from the main stem reservoirs to meet normal runoff conditions. This year’s runoff will be anything but normal.”
For the why, Herring quotes the Corps’ Master Water Control Manual:
Releases at higher-than-normal rates early in the season that cannot be supported by runoff forecasting techniques is inconsistent with all System purposes other than flood control. All of the other authorized purposes depend upon the accumulation of water in the System rather than the availability of vacant storage space. [Emphasis added.]
Originally, these other purposes were water supply, river navigation and recreation, none of which are served by failing to leave enough reservoir space for normal runoff in a high runoff year. But through thirty years of environmentalist domination of the federal bureaucracy, additional purposes have gained ever higher priority. The Missouri River should be “natural”:
The Clinton administration threw its support behind the change, officially shifting the priorities of the Missouri River dam system from flood control, facilitation of commercial traffic, and recreation to habitat restoration, wetlands preservation, and culturally sensitive and sustainable biodiversity.
Herring even quotes a Corps biologist celebrating the current flood:
The former function of the river is being restored in this one-year event. In the short term, it could be detrimental, but in the long term it could be very beneficial.”
Sherlock Holmes’ method of exclusion
The direct evidence here is merely suggestive. “Habitat restoration” is a high priority goal and there is a bit of overt cheerleading for flooding. Far from conclusive, but how else to explain not vacating even a normal amount of reservoir space in a peak snowpack year?
Climate contrarians know to be wary of argument by the principle of exclusion. That’s what the CO2 alarmists do. Eyes wide shut to extensive evidence that 20th century warming was caused by an 80 year grand maximum of solar-magnetic activity, they claim warming has to be due to CO2 because every other possible explanation has been ruled out.
But in The Case of the Waterlogged Corps(e), Sherlock’s method of exclusion is reasonable. The usual problem of failing to identify all the possibilities doesn’t apply because the list of agency objectives is specified. Of these, “habitat restoration” is the only one that is served by the Corps’ actions.
The other possibility is that these government functionaries failed to notice that they had not vacated even the usual amount of space from their reservoirs, but low as expectations are for government work, this isn’t really plausible. Such a mistake would have to be motivated, and as Herring points out, we know these people’s motivations. Almost to a man they are eco-leftists, and we know the eco-leftist position on rivers.
It isn’t the dot-connecting that is outlandish, it is the dots. People who expressly want to see floodplains returned to their natural state followed policies that guaranteed massive flooding. Herring is right: this calls for investigation.
Rational environmentalism
To the extent that risk of flooding can be lowered by flood-control infrastructure, the extra building on floodplains that this risk-reduction encourages is perfectly rational. What induces irrational building on flood plains is the federal government’s longstanding policy of providing subsidized or implicit flood insurance.
After major flooding the government is prone to declare a disaster area. Even if the flood victims are not made whole, their losses are substantially mitigated, reducing the natural disincentive to build in flood zones. Get rid of this market interference and flood damages would be much diminished. In particular, flood plains would end up relegated mainly to agricultural uses that can weather occasional flooding with limited damage.
Seasonal flooding can actually be good for farmland so there is room for a win-win solution where flood control systems are set up to inundate large agricultural bottom lands as necessary to provide room for floodwaters. Instead of farmland on the outside of our riparian cities, substantial amounts of the best farmland would be on the inside of these cities. We see some of this now, but it would go much further if the government limited itself to infrastructure and did not interfere in markets. Safer for people, better for farming, better for migratory birds and the environment, and better for taxpayers.
Not easy to get there, after people have been building on the strength of government promises of relief for many decades, but it is a solution that is rational both economically and environmentally. Unfortunately, this is not what the eco-freaks want.
Instead of “natural” in the market-driven or liberty-driven sense, they embrace a sans-human naturalism, and it looks like the administrators of our flood-control infrastructure are in this camp. They have been hostile to flood-control infrastructure per se since the Clinton era, which is the only obvious explanation for why this infrastructure has been so completely misused.
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>>CynicalScientist says: June 26, 2011 at 3:27 am
>>Perhaps the Army Corps of Engineers thinks…..
Whoa, there. That’s an oxymoron, surely ?
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Re food costs: The June 16 edition of Western Ag Reporter notes that due to wet weather only 11% of the Ohio corn crop was planted by mid May, compared to usual 80%. The disruption of rural communities by tornadoes has set back planting in other areas of the Midwest. Floods have taken more land out of use. Some states are reporting only 58% of corn acreage sowed. Commodity analysts say wet weather will give us the lowest global corn inventory in 37 years.
>>polistra says: June 26, 2011 at 7:27 am
>>. Most of the problem arises from real estate developments in floodplains since 1950.
That’s true. In the UK a few years ago we had many complaints about houses on the floodplains being flooded.
The clue lies in the name, chaps.
As usual the government will do nothing to sort out the problem or give leadership, and responsibility now rests with insurance companies. At least these have the common sense to charge 4x the price for flood plain properties, making it uneconomic to build there.
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Wolfwalker is a troll who cross posted the same thing at Ace of Spades.
Bill Illis, resevoirs in Calif are full. You can check that yourself.
I bet there are some juicy e-mails sitting on the Corp’s servers just waiting to see the light of day.
I’ve always felt that if you have levees and dikes, you’re asking for trouble. They will always fail eventually. Flood plains are there for a reason. The Skagit Valley in Western Washington will have to deal with this at some point as well.
Alec,
“JJ notes that balancing flood control with uses that depend on capturing water is a longstanding problem. Yes, obviously, but that does not account for a glaring deviation from established safe practices.”
You havent shown any deviation from established practices. To the contrary, you quote this, from the Water Control Manual:
Releases at higher-than-normal rates early in the season that cannot be supported by runoff forecasting techniques is inconsistent with all System purposes other than flood control. All of the other authorized purposes depend upon the accumulation of water in the System rather than the availability of vacant storage space.
But you dont seem to understand what that means. It says that early season reservoir drawdown is inconsistent with ALL System purposes other than flood control. That is what I was trying to explain to you. When they say ALL sysyem purposes, they are talking about irrigation, municple water, power generation, recreation, etc. ALL of those system purposes are predicated on operating the system in ways that are exactly the opposite of the needs of flood control.
” Of course argument by exclusion is not very reliable, as I noted, but such an obvious deviation has to be motivated, and traditional water use objectives cannot account for it.”
As I noted: nonsense. Traditional water use objectives want full reservoirs, and traditional water users dont want water release on the rising limb of the hydrograph during the spring. That ‘wastes’ water in their view, and risks having less than brimming reservoirs to be used during the dry season. There is no ‘obvious deviation’ for hushed reasons of environmental terrorism. The simple fact of the matter is, our system is not run to optimize for flood control. It never has been, and it never will be. If it were, reservoirs would be sized to hold the 500 year flood, and they would be empty 99% of the time. That is how flood control dams are operated. The bulk of the system is not run like that, because empty reservoirs do not generate power, or provide for irrigation, or support water skiers and bass fishing tournaments. Environmentalists looking for a natural hydrograph want dams removed, not run at full capacity at the whims of consumptive users.
If you truly believe in your
exclusionaryconspiracy theory principle driven scenario, then why not test it? Hop on over to the next Corp meeting in your favorite Western ag town, and demand that the System be run in a manner that is optimized for flood control, instead of irrigation. Pay attention to who screams. It wont be the greenies.Ft Peck reservoir is full for the first time in more than a decade. People are very, very happy about that. If you had gone there three months ago and demanded that it be drawn down, to make room for the possibility that eastern Montana would get six months worth of rain in two days, your head would be rotting on a pitchfork and Minot would still be flooded.
Corcoran, you need to check your terminology. A troll is somebody who posts something they don’t believe merely to cause trouble. At both Ace of Spades and here, I posted something that I do believe, to provide an alternate point of view which I believe has value. I didn’t bother to defend it at Ace because the initial reaction there told me I’d be wasting my time. I had somewhat higher hopes for the people here.
DesertYote: “You fail to realize that the ACE does what they are TOLD to do. Engineering of the Mississippi valley happens to be the most politicized of all their projects.”
Of course the ACE is limited by their mission statements and their instructions from higher-up. But how does that contradict what I said, which is that the ACE has a serious competence problem? You may not be aware of this, but after the Katrina disaster in New Orleans, it came out that the Army Corps of Engineers had bungled the analysis and design for several critical levees in the city’s levee system. I mean really bungled it. Screwed the pooch. FUBAR. Charlie Foxtrot. That wasn’t the result of bureaucratic red tape, or of bad mission statements. It was plain old-fashioned incompetence. I have heard and read of similar screwups in other ACE-run projects. We agree that the Mississippi Valley division of the ACE is heavily politicized and that makes it harder for the ACE to do anything right … but politicization is far from the ACE’s only problem.
Wolfwalker, it’s still troll behavior if your cross post at many sites, even if you are a true believer in your cause.
JJ,
“‘environmentalism’… has been intentionally and officially discriminated against, to the detriment of other than the entrenched special interests, for the entire history of the West.”
So now people must suffer to make up for this lost time? When more towns flood this year (the snowpack is late melting), and they will… the excuses you offer will mean nothing. “Saving the planet”, as George Carlin put it, is now officially more important than people’s lives even by your own words. And everyone knows it.
My two cents on the water management issue. First, some background on my experience. I spent a good deal of time in the 1960s and 70s around Lake Travis, just north of Austin, Texas where Mansfield Dam is situated on the Colorado River. That dam is operated for all of the purposes mentioned in the above comments, flood control, irrigation water supply, fishing, boating, swimming, and hydroelectric power generation. The Colorado in Texas is named the same, but is a different river from the Colorado river that runs through the Grand Canyon.
The dam was built primarily for flood control, because the Colorado had devastating floods in the early 20th century. The first dam built at that site failed during a flood. The current dam was also less than adequate and was modified during construction to increase the height by 80 feet. The lake is a variable level lake, and is maintained at a level sufficient to contain most or all of the expected runoff during each Spring rainy season. Snow runoff is not an issue. The Colorado required a series of dams, 5 in all, to adequately control the flooding.
The other lake features are an added benefit besides the flood control benefit. There is a substantial power generation, and water is released for domestic use and for irrigation. A good portion of the water is also used by a nuclear power plant at the mouth of the river, the South Texas Nuclear Project. The river water is used to cool the reactors and the steam from the turbines.
With all the uses from that lake, the operator (LCRA, or Lower Colorado River Authority) takes direction from the US Army Corps of Engineers when the level rises above the full mark at 681 feet above Mean Sea Level, MSL. The spillway level is somewhat higher at 714 feet above MSL.
. http://www.lcra.org/water/dams/mansfield.html
P Walker
“I’ve heard next to nothing about the impact this flooding is having on crop production . The combination of a late , wet spring , severe weather and flooding is bound to have done some serious damage – and not only in the Missouri drainage . I’m thinking that food prices might get pretty ugly this winter . Does anyone out ther have a handle on this ?”
The post planting USDA planting report was 90 million acres for corn, down from an initial projection of just over 92 million acres for corn. For the most part, the crop got planted. In Iowa it is doing well.
The initial reports that I heard on the flood situation is that 450,000 acres of cropland along the Missouri would be inundated, more lately I’ve heard 150,000 acres. The latter number seems reasonable to me based on a drive from Sioux City to Missouri Valley, Iowa and some very crude math. The reports are not specific to the crop, but by my observation the Iowa cropland in that area is primarily corn and is among the little in Iowa that is irrigated. Irrigated corn in Iowa yields roughly double non-irrigated. It appears to me that the area has too many wet spots to run the irrigation pivots so though 450,000 acres have not been lost, much will not get the doubling due to irrigation. Some of that corn will get all the water it needs from below ground.
The Missouri River flood levels have not reached as high as initially projected by the Corps. This is in part due to less than projected runoff from below the Garretson Dam in the tributaries. More rain could increase the flooded area to closer to the 450,000 acres initially projected.
Countering the shortfall in land planted is a trend to increase crop densities planted, and a reduction in cattle being fed, so less corn eaten by cattle. Continuing wet weather usually means better corn, (we are getting more rain tonight) but dry is needed during pollination in July.
My guess is that the corn crop will not be much different than last year.
Look it’s amazing, it’s to never get out of that new
The Corps of Engineers operates the Missouri River dams according to a manual specific to the Missouri River. The policies in that manual were hashed out by the political battles that went into the manual. The Corps’ actions can only be interpreted according to that manual. If the Corps followed those policies to the current result, blame the manual, not the Corps. I have heard no-one review the Corps’ operations in light of the manual.
It also has to be reiterated that earlier this year there was severe flooding on the southern Mississippi. A release of water from the Missouri system before and during that event had to include the consideration of first a possible increase of flooding in the Southern Mississippi and later a certain increase in flooding in that area, balanced against a possible flooding along the Missouri.
The Missouri system has the largest amount of storage and control available to the Corps in dealing with floods in the Mississippi River system. There is no similar control on either the Ohio or Mississippi Rivers or tributaries.
JJ: The deviation from established practices is asserted in the statement from the manager of the Pierre water system, who warned in February that there was a less than normal drawdown of the reservoirs despite higher than normal snowpack.
The point on Uk coastal erosion is not the same. The UK government looked at looked at the land value and publicly decided it was not economic to defend much of the land. A very public policy review. You see the risks when you buy, and the risk is reflected in the price, If you are counting on the public purse to protect your private land, you know there is a risk they can change thier policy,
“Andrew Parker says:
June 26, 2011 at 11:31 am
@Frosty, What you recommend was encouraged by the Dept. of Agriculture after the Dust Bowl and a series of devastating flash floods in the ’20′s and ’30′s. Contour plowing, wind breaks, waterway buffers, etc..”
Interesting, thanks Andrew, I’ll have to see if I can find some original DoA advice sheets of the time to see how much of this “cutting edge” wheel is a redesign 😉 I thought Yoeman invented keyline in the 50’s.
It seems these type of agricultural land/grazing management techniques, for soil building and drought tolerance, are gaining popularity again, especially in areas of degraded soils (they reversed desertification during a drought in Zimbabwe). Sensible farmers who design from observation of the physical landscape call it Regenerative Agriculture (see http://regenag.com/web/).
Subsidy suckers who design from observation of the political landscape call it “carbon farming” 😉
JJ said: “Ft Peck reservoir is full for the first time in more than a decade. People are very, very happy
about that. If you had gone there three months ago and demanded that it be drawn down, to make
room for the possibility that eastern Montana would get six months worth of rain in two days,
your head would be rotting on a pitchfork and Minot would still be flooded.”
True except for the last bit (and the part about eastern Montana should read “parts of easten Montana”). The gauges upstream from the Ft Peck dam show flooding but nothing like the downstream record flooding. Something is wrong with this picture: http://waterdata.usgs.gov/mt/nwis/uv?cb_00065=on&format=gif_default&period=90&site_no=06185500
Eric (skeptic):
A quick look at some maps shows that the Souris River apparently flows into Canada, Not to the Missouri River. So Fort Peck on the Missouri River has nothing to do with the flooding on the Souris, which is on a different river system.
Someone else confirm that. The maps I looked at were not crystal clear.
The Oahe reservoir at Pierre hit a record LOW level in 2006 as a result of dought. At one point former Gov. Janklow wanted to sue the Corp for releasing too much water. There are both politcial and natural reasons for holding back water and Mother Nature continues to frustrate th plans of mice and men, best laid or not.
JJ says:
June 26, 2011 at 6:46 pm
&
Eric (skeptic) says:
June 27, 2011 at 5:24 am
You both seem to have not the slightest clue what you are talking about;
Minot has nothing whatsoever to do with Ft. Peck or the Missouri river. The Souris drains into the Red river in Winnipeg.
Also; these dams were built for flood mitigation. I know the manual now includes a list of other determining factors, and the dams were built with hydro-electric generators, but the reason they were funded was flood control. Yes, recreation was anticipated and the merchants knew it. Irrigation was considered, and the farmers supported that. But if it hadn’t been for the recent extreme flooding events, the dams never would’ve been built.
As far as consideration of the Mississippi flooding in April; if they’d begun releasing additional from Gavin’s point in February or March that very possibly would have affected the Mississippi below St. Louis in April and May.
Now, I don’t know what their models look like, but the possibility that they anticipated a 8-15 inch rainfall event over the course of 168 hours in the mid-Mississippi valley some 4-8 weeks before it happened and decided against opening up Gavin’s Point seems a bit remote to me. Maybe their forecast models are better than I thought, but last Thursday I was assured of having great weather on my local Army Corps lake and got rain all weekend instead, greatly disappointing my wife and children, and several dozen crappie and walleye as well.
Regardless, if they’d put those reservoirs low in the fall, which they usually do, there’d be a lot less of a problem in the Missouri river valley today. Somebody ought to look at the rules, how those rules were established, and whether they were followed. Can’t do any more than that and making accusations at this point is futile. If the green/eco warrior members of the Army Corps are found to have violated the rules, I am certain the UCMJ has an appropriate punishment for that crime. If they are have found to have influenced the rules to fit their agenda and then followed the rules, I am sure we can correct the rules and highlight the problems of allowing these people to change the rules. One more feather in the hat of engineering over hippie, love bead, mother earth gaia, moon-beam and good vibes moronism that is the eco-freak green warrior agenda. Not sure we can do better than that.
Either way; when you throw Minot into the mix, (or go with “true except for that last bit”, and then miss the Minot error) you show a lack of understanding of the geography of the situation that discredits whatever else you wish to say.
wolfwalker
June 26, 2011 at 7:37 pm
###
So you buy the propaganda of lefties trying to cover their butts and play the blame Bush game. Sorry doesn’t wash. The ACE had been warning of disaster for over FORTY YEARS! Politics has tied their hands from doing anything. BTW, absolutely no levy system could have saved New Orleans. And no conceivable levy system will save it in the future. Its a lost cause, the Mississippi will win.
@Frosty, Yep, not much new under the sun. I took some time to rummage through my library and finally found a couple of my Dad’s old Yearbooks of Agriculture. The years 1938, “Soils and Men”, and 1955, “Water”, have excellent articles on erosion control and watershed management. I know there is another one that I remember, but I haven’t been able to locate it. The specific article I was looking for covered the WPA terracing in the Wasatch mountains.
@Frosty, Sorry, that terracing was done by the CCC.
Alec,
“The deviation from established practices is asserted in the statement from the manager of the Pierre water system, who warned in February that there was a less than normal drawdown of the reservoirs despite higher than normal snowpack.”
No, it really isnt. What you have is a statement plucked from an email from Feb 3, stating that as of that date, the Corps hadn’t emptied reservoirs enough to accomodate typical spring runoff. That is the assertion. Is that true? If it is true, is it a deviation from standard practice? Is drawdown for expected annual runoff capacity achieved by Feb 3 every year, based on Jan snowpack (only halfway thru the snow season)? That isnt even asserted.
Then, look at the rest of that article from the Capital Journal. What does it say? That the Corps was following SOP wrt to drawdowns. That the Corps did make flood control based releases according to their standard model predictions. That even Brad Lawrence was tentative in his predictions, qualifying them with:
“That is assuming that we get enough warmth this summer to melt it all. We failed to melt all the snow last summer, so it is entirely possible that we will build more year round snow pack, AKA the making of a glacier.”
And he didn’t predict what actually happened any better than the Corps did, which was that a hugely anomalous rain on snow event (6 months of rain in two days) melted all of that snow, not over the course of the summer, but within a few days.
There is nothing presented in this scenario than is not consistent with the Corps SOP – operate the system to maintain full pool under the expected (from modeling) runoff regime. Operating the system that way – running flood control on the ragged edge in deference to maintaining stored water, releasing ‘just enough’ water to meet the modeled expectation – is a response to the other System purposes (irrigation, recreation, navigation, etc). That is explicitly stated in the quote from the Water Control Manual. There is no environmentalist bogey man visible here.
Sorry, I followed JJ’s comment and didn’t error check it. Of course Minot has nothing to do with Williston which has beaten its old flood record by 3 feet. But my point is very valid, Williston was flooded to a new record, but upstream from Williston is the dam that JJ talked about. Upstream from that (the link I posted) there was high water but no record flooding. It is obvious that the dam policy was not formulated for this contingency.