When the levee breaks
Barges stranded, levees breached and a town in danger: How the Mississippi River is dividing a community — literally — in southern Illinois
OLIVE BRANCH, Ill. – Miller City Road, the two-lane blacktop that slices across Dogtooth Bend peninsula at the southern tip of Illinois, has been pummeled by Mississippi River floodwaters for three years.
The road, a crucial artery for those who live and farm on the isolated expanse of land 375 miles and a world away from Chicago, is pockmarked by giant potholes and lined by stacks of uprooted tree limbs. Rocks reinforce the shoulder, placed there by Alexander County road crews to prevent the pavement from slipping into the muck.
Two river barges are marooned atop a muddy farm field a few feet from the road, adding an apocalyptic touch to the landscape. The silver-flecked barges have been
stranded there since July, when floodwaters sucked the barges through the breach of the Len Small Levee.
The 17-mile-long levee, an earthen barrier along the Mississippi’s eastern bank designed to protect Dogtooth Bend’s fertile farms and smattering of homes, has sported a gaping hole since New Year’s Day 2016. Water and sediment from the river has been spilling across the peninsula ever since.
“There,” Adam Thomas said, pointing toward his farm field from the edge of the water near his storage shed, “is the Mississippi River, which is not supposed to be there.”
The scene at Dogtooth Bend is the latest example of how the rising river and repeat
flooding is slowly changing the very geography of Illinois and the Midwest. The breach at Len Small is also emblematic of the ongoing friction between local residents, regional officials and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Dozens of levees designed to hold back the Mississippi River along Illinois’ western edge have suffered damage in recent years, putting thousands of people at risk and billions of dollars of property in danger. It is a tussle between humans whose lives are upended by flooding and a river powered by more frequent, drenching rains driven by a changing climate. So far, nature is winning.
Eventually, scientists, politicians and residents say, Dogtooth Bend may be cut off completely from the rest of Illinois, the swelling waters carving a new path and leaving the peninsula surrounded by water.
“It’s basically destroying the whole area,” said Alexander County engineer Jeff Denny, who supervised the Miller City Road repairs. “It put sand in places that no one ever dreamed.”
Ordinarily, the river travels around a U-shaped bend at Dogtooth. The wide turn brackets the peninsula on three sides as it continues its journey toward Cairo, Illinois, and the confluence with the Ohio River, where Illinois converges with Missouri and Kentucky. But the breach allows about 30% of the river volume to head eastward across the sparsely populated spit of land, carving a new path with impunity.
“Every time they turn around, the water’s coming back in, taking their land, taking their roads,” said U.S. Rep. Mike Bost, whose district includes Dogtooth Bend.
Thomas, 32, is usually wrapping up the harvest this time of year. But water and mud covers a wide swath of his 15,000 acres, so all he can do is wait for the water to subside.
He gazed out toward the damaged sprinkler irrigation system in front of undulating mounds of riverbottom sand. Thomas shook his head as the windswept sediment forms tiny dunes.
“It’s just a mess,” Thomas said. “That used to be the blackest, most perfect soil on Earth. And now it’s under 10 feet of sand.”
Humans vs. nature
On a recent raw November day, the autumn sky above Dogtooth Bend is aglow in hues of lavender and amber as the sun sets beyond the Missouri side of the river. The river pools across the browning plains of Thomas’ farm, slowly churning in a fresh direction across the oldest county in the state. To the east, rushing water scours into the land. Water is cutting into both sides of the 3-mile-wide peninsula. Behind the broken levee, the water has pushed more than a mile inland, nearly halfway across the top of the bend.
In dry times, farmers grow corn and soybeans here. The peninsula has not been dry much these days.
Since the levee broke in 2016, as much as 95% of Dogtooth Bend — named because the peninsula looks like a dogtooth on the map — has been covered in 3 feet of water, Denny said. If the levee did not have a hole, he said, even with all of the recent rains, the peninsula would be 95% dry.
After the breach, the Army Corps studied how much it would cost to fix the levee, determining “the cost of repairs were greater than the economic benefits of the project being done over time,” said John Osterhage, chief of emergency operations for the corps’ St. Louis District. “It wouldn’t be a viable project.”
Instead, the corps has worked to stabilize the ends of the breach and added rocks to the bottom of the hold in an effort to prevent more water from heading inland.
Because the Len Small Levee is not a federal levee, and is instead managed and maintained by the local levee district, the corps’ reach is limited. Osterhage said the federal government will contribute money to repairs but only if the local district contributes at least 20% of the funding.
The total cost to repair the breach, Osterhage said, is “in the millions of dollars.” One estimate cited in court papers placed the number at $16.6 million.
And Len Small is not the only one. There are five levees alone in Alexander County, along the Mississippi, Ohio and Cache rivers, protecting agricultural land, towns and the city of Cairo. In Illinois, 576 levee systems line 1,951 miles of land and water, according to the National Levee Database. Four levees in Illinois are considered to be at high risk of inundation because of a breach or system failure, according to a study of upper Mississippi River levees from the Environmental Law & Policy Center, placing more than 150,000 people and $16.9 billion of property in danger.
The situation at Dogtooth Bend has left the residents and farmers of the peninsula restless, wondering if this is the new reality.
“I feel helpless and hopeless and tired and angry and frustrated,” said Sherry Pecord, who lives near the breach and owns the land where the barges are marooned.
In July, Bost, a Republican, introduced legislation with Democrat U.S. Rep. Abby Finkenauer of Iowa that would require the Army Corps to weigh navigational benefits when calculating whether a levee such as Len Small should receive rehabilitation funds. A roundtable about flooding and the levee during the August recess drew an overflow crowd. Even though Bost touted the legislation from the House floor at the U.S. Capitol in September, the legislation has not made it out of committee.
“This is a national issue and it’s dealing with commerce,” Bost said in a phone interview. “This isn’t a partisan issue at all.”
A course change would not only fundamentally alter the landscape but provide potential navigational challenges for the barges and boats that use that section of the river to transport goods up and down the river. More than 52 million tons of grain, in addition to millions of tons of petroleum, coal, iron and steel, minerals and chemicals, were transported around Dogtooth Bend in 2018, according to statistics from the Army Corps and the U.S. Coast Guard.
Still, there are environmental groups and scientists who argue the river should not be constricted by human-made structures and that allowing the river to run its course is the best long-term solution for the river valley. Even without repairs at Len Small, the river permanently changing course is likely a distant prospect, Denny and Osterhage said. But it’s not out of the question in the future.
“I think if you give it enough time or if there’s a big enough flood event, it could happen,” Denny said. “At this point, it’s not imminent or anything.”
Boating home
None of this sits well for residents of Dogtooth Bend. Pecord, whose house along Miller City Road is surrounded by its own earthen levee, simply wants the breach fixed. The floods keep coming, seemingly worse with each passing year. This summer, Pecord needed a boat to access her house. One of her neighbors still needs to boat across the new channel to reach his home.
“Did I have to boat home for 130 days? Yeah. Was that a pain in the ass? Yeah. But do I love where I live? Yeah,” Pecord said from the front room of the Horseshoe Bar & Grill as her daughter tended bar.
A few miles from the levee breach, Pecord’s bar is a magnet for waterfowl hunters and locals downing pilsners and cocktails amid the bald cypress trees at the edge of the Horseshoe Lake Conservation Area.
In 2011, residents of Dogtooth Bend and nearby Olive Branch, a hamlet of about 850 people along Illinois Route 3 and the selfdubbed “Goose Hunting Capital of the World,” were offered buyouts as part of a $12 million Federal Emergency Management Agency program designed to relocate people out of the floodplain. The plan was modeled in part on the example of Valmeyer, Illinois, a community 30 miles south of St. Louis that was relocated to higher ground after 1993 flooding.
Many decided to take the offer. Pecord, 52, and her husband, Sean, a third-generation farmer with family roots at Dogtooth, decided to stay.
“How are you supposed to walk away from everything you own?” Pecord asked. “Are you supposed to walk away from all of that? It really (ticks) me off when people get up on their high horse, in their dry homes and their dry rooms, and say, ‘Why don’t you just move?’ They don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know about flooding or the levees.”
In 2018, the Pecords and 60 others who own property in Alexander County filed suit against the U.S. government, arguing that the Army Corps’ failure to finance the levee repair, combined with a practice of placing a variety of structures such as wing dikes in the river, has contributed to the flooding of their land, violating their Fifth Amendment rights. In August, the U.S. Court of Federal Appeals dismissed the case.
‘It’s all up in the air’
The battle between humans and nature is nothing new in Alexander County. In an 1883 book tucked away on the shelf of the Cairo Public Library, local historians writing about Dogtooth Bend detailed how the area’s first settlers encountered the same struggles in the early 1800s.
“The danger from high water has always kept this portion of the county from settling like the other portions,” says one passage from the book “History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties Illinois.” “Dog Tooth and North Cairo partake much of the same nature as Goose Island, and much of their area is overflowed in a time of high water.”
Alexander County, according to the federal lawsuit, has experienced major floods 19 times between 1844 and 2011. The Len Small Levee, named after the 26th governor of Illinois, was built in 1927 and expanded in 1969 to span the bend in the river and “deflect high velocity floodwaters” away from agricultural land.
Many areas of Illinois have received between 6 and 20 inches of precipitation above normal in 2019, according to the Illinois State Climatologist Office. The southern tip of the state, including Dogtooth Bend and Cairo, has been hit particularly hard, receiving more than 16 inches of rain above the yearly average through mid-November, according to the climate office.
A March report by a team of Midwestern researchers suggests extreme bouts of precipitation and flooding could be the new normal in the Great Lakes region due to climate change. While the United States has seen annual precipitation climb 4% between 1901 and 2015, Great Lakes states have experienced a 10% rise.
Since the 2016 breach, the area near Pecord’s home and Thomas’ farm has experienced flooding each year, depositing millions of tons of sand and leaving thousands of acres underwater.
Thomas has not been able to farm most of his land for two growing seasons, relying on crop insurance to get by. But his insurance policy will not cover another flood year. So he waits. And hopes for a dry spring and a Mississippi that will be lower and tamer than previous springs.
“It’s all a risk. It’s all a gamble,” Thomas said, taking a swig from a can of Busch Light inside the Horseshoe bar. “It’s very stressful. This is our livelihood. This is what we all want to do. And it’s all up in the air.”
The Pecords, meanwhile, are negotiating with the barge company to receive payment for the damage the marooned equipment has caused to their land. Four other barges were towed back into the river, but the water receded before two could be removed.
Pecord said she believes the Army Corps prioritizes the federal levees on the Missouri side of the river over the Len Small breach on the Illinois shoreline. Indeed, the Birds Point Levee protects more land downstream from Len Small. That levee is federally managed and part of the Mississippi River and Tributaries system, which protects 2.5 million acres of land in Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee. It also helps the river maintain a consistent level for navigation from Cairo all the way to New Orleans, Osterhage said.
Osterhage said the corps’ goal is to help all parties along the river.
“We don’t hold a grudge against anyone,” he said. “We want to help everyone.”
Pecord has her doubts about whether the government will help Dogtooth Bend. But regardless of what happens with the levee, she’s determined to stay.
“We’re hardcore,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere until our house washes away.”
“It’s all a risk. It’s all a gamble. It’s very stressful. This is our livelihood. This is what we all want to do.” — Adam Thomas, 32, who farms near Dogtooth Bend