Troubled Mississippi waters run deep
River’s changes create chaos from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico
ALONG THE RIVER – The Mississippi runs the spine of America, touching 10 states and draining waters from 21 more, a vast waterway with a rich mythology, a sometimes powerful beauty and an always alarming propensity to flood.
Nearly 30 locks and dams hold back water in the river’s upper reaches. Every river bend to the south is lined by concrete to slow the water’s corrosive force. Levees corset thousands of miles of riverbanks and 170 bridges run above. All of this infrastructure is aimed at permitting barge traffic and protecting farms and cities. Most of it is decrepit.
Now, with President Donald Trump’s push for a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan, there are hopes of billions to fix up the Mississippi. But there are clashes over which projects to pursue, and no agreement on how to pay for any of it.
A move to tame one portion of the river can create chaos for people somewhere else along its 2,350-mile path, and in that precarious balance is the key to understanding the competing interests and enduring problems that vex the entire country.
“To understand America at this time,” says R.D. James, a Missouri farmer and new Army assistant secretary overseeing its Corps of Engineers, “you have to understand the river.”
At the same time, it’s clear that the river itself has changed.
“It doesn’t behave like it used to,” said John Carlin, a towboat pilot who has worked the Hannibal, Missouri, riverfront for more than 40 years. “Seems like it doesn’t take much to get out of control.”
Now, the Mississippi is flooding again. Last week, after a deluge of late-winter rain, the Corps opened a massive floodway just above New Orleans, an emergency relief valve that it has been forced to use with increasingly regularity – three times in just the last seven years.
Infrastructure is a bureaucratic word, a way of describing human efforts to impose order on nature. More than almost anything government does, the effects of the infrastructure it builds can be felt for generations. Earth is moved. Water redirected. Tunnels dug. Roads paved. It is man’s hubris on naked display. Sometimes, the infrastructure turns out to be the enemy, and that fact makes the people working and living along the Mississippi wary of the promises coming from Washington.
Some river watchers perked up when Trump mentioned “waterways across our land” as part of his infrastructure target list during his recent State of the Union speech. That sounded like good news. But Trump’s plan mostly scales back the government’s long-running role in charting the Mississippi’s course, calling for more private investment and less federal oversight along the river.
That, many here say, will create a
host of new problems.
“It’s disappointing,” said Mike Toohey, president of the Waterways Council, a barge industry group, echoing the reaction of many people who use the river. “We’re running on an interstate of water. And we’re always being overlooked.”
The trouble with controlling the Mississippi today is that it has evolved into three different river systems.
The upper Mississippi is a string of slack-water pools held behind dams, with water so placid that water skiing was invented there in 1922.
The middle portion is a mishmash of wing dikes and arched chevrons - man-made structures to “train” the river. Here, it is artificially narrowed, only half as wide in St. Louis as it was in the early 1800s.
The truly fearsome Mississippi doesn’t start until the confluence with the Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois, where the water emerges like a monster on par with the Amazon or Congo rivers. The Mississippi then runs to the Gulf of Mexico, hidden behind an extensive levee system built after the Great Flood of 1927, a disaster that displaced 1 percent of the country’s population as levees fell like toppled dominoes.
That flood’s legacy still guides how the river is controlled today.
The Army Corps of Engineers oversees most of the river’s infrastructure and runs it with a battle general’s intent. It’s the Corps that operates the locks and dams, that built the levee system in the lower Mississippi; it maintains the tools used to control the water levels throughout and regulates levees farther north.
But a growing number of critics say the Corps’ flood-fighting efforts make flooding worse.
“It’s like fighting the moon,” said Robert Criss, a hydrogeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies the river running just a few miles from his office door. “It’s stupid to fight.”
And it can look like a losing battle.
In the past seven years, the Mississippi River Valley has been hit with 100-, 200- and 500-year floods - ones that had a 1 percent or less chance of happening in each timespan - that caused damages of more than $50 billion. Disasters along the river “have become persistent and systemic,” noted a group representing 75 cities from 10 states in a report last year.
The White House response sketched out in Trump’s infrastruc- ture plan is inadequate, said the group, the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative. It actually makes it harder to fund new flood protections by slashing the federal government’s project cost-sharing from the current 50 to 80 percent down to 20 percent, said Colin Wellenkamp, the group’s executive director. So for every $1 in federal funds, local and state governments would need to chip in $4.
“That’s interesting,” Wellenkamp said dryly. “How are we going to be saddled with that?”
The group is also worried that the White House’s proposed budget cuts would kill off other federal programs that already pay for river infrastructure, such as a Transportation Department grant program that has spent $162 million in recent years to help pay for new bridges, ports and riverfront improvements.
Meanwhile, historic river crests are falling like home-run records during Major League Baseball’s steroids era. In Hannibal, Missouri., where people have been recording river heights since Mark Twain’s time, four of the top 10 crests have come in the past decade.
In Brainerd, Minnesota, it’s five of the top 10.
In Natchez, Mississippi, it’s three of 10 - and this week, they’re bracing to record another.
“You can call it climate change, but whatever you call it, things are changing,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Wehr, who oversaw the Corps’ operations on the river until being promoted last year to be second in command at the Corps’ headquarters in Washington.
Said Norma Jean Mattei, a University of New Orleans civil engineer and member of the Mississippi River Commission, which oversees how the Corps runs the river, “We’ve got to modify how we manage the river.”
But Criss considers the Corps and its use of river infrastructure to be one of the problems.
“The water has nowhere to go,” he said.
You don’t flood out your neighbors. It’s one of the unwritten rules of the river.
Just the accusation is enough to spark a fistfight. But people had long suspected that the levees across from Hannibal were too tall, making the flooding worse for neighbors downstream.
So a crew from the Corps came out two years ago in ATVs, riding along 200 miles of riverbanks to measure levee heights. The Corps found that the walls were 2 to 3 feet taller than the agency allows in many spots, stretching from Burlington, Iowa, down almost to St. Louis.
The Hannibal-area levees belong to Sny Island - an Illinois drainage district so carefully maintained that it has flooded only once in 110 years, a point of pride for vigilant farmers and volunteers there.
But today, the Sny’s levees frighten people such as Nancy Guyton, who leads a group accusing the district of breaking with long-held tradition.
“If they get away with this,” Guyton warned recently, “they’re going to ruin the river.”
She and her husband own a small farm outside Annada, Missouri. They have lived through several major river floods. But now the water seems high all the time.
Now, Guyton was sitting in Calvin’s Restaurant in tiny Eolia, Missouri, with Mark Harvey, another member of the group Neighbors of the Mississippi, which represents residents of three counties downriver of the Sny.
Harvey is not a farmer. He’s not going to lose any crops if the river floods.
But he is the superintendent of Pike County schools. He knows that flooded farmland is worthless. He sees the Sny’s levees as a threat to buying textbooks and paying teachers.
“You can’t just build a wall and say to heck with it,” Harvey said.
In an office across the river, Mike Reed sounded offended.
Reed runs the Sny levee district from New Canton, Illinois, a town tucked next to a limestone bluff that served as the riverbank eons ago. Today, the river is six miles away - across some of the most fertile farmland in the world - and kept there by a levee wall.
Reed said Sny farmers and residents felt as if they’d been “smeared” by the Corps.
“Why are they going after us?” Reed said. “Why are we made to look like a rogue levee district that raised its levees in the dark of night?”
The Corps says its position is simple. Some levees have soared past their federally authorized levels, with most of the height added after a major flood in 2008.
“Their levees have been altered without careful evaluation and no permission,” said Scott Whitney, flood risk manager for the Corps’ Rock Island District.
A couple of feet might not sound like much. But every inch of levee height pushes floodwaters from one place to another. With levees blocking the river from its natural flood plain, the water has only one place to go: up.
The Corps can’t force a levee district to lower its levees. It can only stop paying for levee repairs. Each state regulates its levees - and the Mississippi touches 10 different states.
“The science is clear,” said Nicholas Pinter, associate director at the Center for Watershed Sciences of the University of California at Davis, who has extensively studied flood risks on the Mississippi. “When one levee district builds bigger levees, it increases the size and magnitude of flooding across the river, 10 miles up and down, too.”
Pinter said he was surprised that so many levee districts were building walls that are clearly too tall.
“The Sny is one of the players in what I would call levee wars,” Pinter said. “And to have it springing up there is puzzling and unnerving. We thought the levee wars” featuring sabotage and gun-toting safety patrols “were a thing of the past.”
Reed said if the Sny district is forced to lower levees, it would lose its 100-year flood rating, meaning the Federal Emergency Management Agency would no longer consider the area to have protection from a once-in-a-century flood. Insurance premiums would skyrocket and the value of Sny farmland would plummet to half the current $12,000 an acre, “which would be devastating.”
Trump’s infrastructure plan proposes reducing the Corps’ role in monitoring levee heights. The plan also proposes stripping the Corps of authority for some levees in the name of reducing costs and complexity. That’s good news for districts looking to raise their levees unfettered. It’s bad news for neighbors hoping the federal government continues to referee disputes along the river.
Guyton and other small groups dotting the riverbanks are alarmed. They say they wouldn’t be able to keep up if flood protection becomes a race to see who can build the biggest.
“This would be a disaster,” Guyton said.
Efforts to control the river start way up north, including at a lock and dam that once gave Minneapolis bragging rights as the river’s “Head of Navigation.”