Prolonged Missouri River flooding could last all winter
OMAHA, Neb .— Flooding along the Missouri River has stretched on for seven months in places and could endure through the winter, leaving some Upper Midwest farmland and possibly some homes encased in ice.
There are several reasons for the flooding, including high levels along the river, saturated ground and broken levees. And with forecasters predicting a wetter-than-normal winter, it's possible flooding could continue in some places all the way until spring, when the normal flood season begins.
“There's no end in sight. None at all,” said Tom Bullock, who hasn't been able to live in his northwestern Missouri home since March because floodwaters cut off access to it.
In Missouri' s Holt County, where Bullock
serves as emergency management director, roughly 30,000 acres (12,140 hectares) of the 95,000 acres ( 38,445 hectares) that flooded last spring remain underwater, and at least some of that floodwater is likely to freeze in place this winter.
Similar conditions exist in places along the lower Missouri River, where broken levees will likely take several years to repair.
Nearly every levee in
Holt County has multiple breaches and many haven' t even been examined yet. Repairs aren't likely to start on most of the area's levees until next year, Bullock said.
One key contributor to the flooding is that the river remains high because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is still releasing massive amounts of water from upstream dams to clear space in the reservoirs to handle next spring's flooding.