No Good Choices
CNN notes that Missouri takes levee battle to U.S. Supreme Court
(CNN) — Missouri on Sunday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt a plan to intentionally breach a levee on the rain-swollen Mississippi River, flooding Missouri farmland in an effort to save an Illinois town.
Earlier, Missouri filed a federal suit to block the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from following through on its plan to breach the Birds Point-New Madrid levee. A federal judge on Friday ruled against Missouri, saying a 1928 law permits the breach of the levee to ease pressure on the river.
Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster filed an application for an injunction to the high court on Sunday. It was assigned to Justice Samuel Alito, according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s website.
The Corps of Engineers says the action is necessary to save the town of Cairo, Illinois, although it will flood rural Missouri farm communities. “I know that the price being paid is high,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh on Saturday.
…As of 3 p.m. (4 p.m. ET), the gauge at Cairo — where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi River — stood at 59.97 feet, a record level. Flood stage is 40 feet, according to the National Weather Service.
The Corps believes that if they don’t relieve the pressure on the system and pull off some of the water, the rest of the system is subject to collapse. They are going to be sued by someone, regardless of what they do. The system is 20 feet above flood stage, and experiencing a 100-year event. It is highly unlikely, given that level, that nothing will fail and the water will simply pour into the Gulf of Mexico.
There are no good choices in this scenario, only some that hopefully impact fewer people.
2 comments
Of course, no one could have anticipated that such an event would take place. 🙄
Remind me: how often does a 100-year flood event happen these days? How long has it been since we saw 10 years without such an event?
Forgive my cynicism. I live in a flood-prone area, in an era in which shit like T.S. Allison happens with IMHO totally ineffective government response. Maybe things have gotten to a point at which, quite literally, nothing can be done. But one does wonder.
Oh, they anticipated it, and that’s why they had a particular segment of the levee already targeted if this happened. You can only make the levees so high before the river becomes unusable for navigation, which is why the Corps is involved.
The farm land is a flood plain. That’s where the water wants to go. The building of almost continuous levees traps the water and makes the situation worse. Winnipeg, for example, built a flood control channel that diverts and significant portion of the water around the city, essentially decreasing the height of the water by increasing the size of the river with a new channel. Of course, they just need to g0 the short distance to Lake Winnipeg.
We would need to build a dry lake that we could fill during the floods to reduce the height, or let it flow into the traditional flood plain.
The problem this year is that both the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers are flooding. so you have flood waters from both rivers combining at Cairo and heading South.