Every time Missouri River flood season gets serious, I take out “the box.â€
The sagging and slightly torn sides of the two-foot-long brown, cardboard container hold historic research that author and journalist Bill Lambrecht gathered in his many years writing about the eight-state river basin and its constant political battles over flooding, levees, navigation, agriculture, recreation and the environment.
When Lambrecht, author of the book left the Post-Dispatch, he bequeathed the box to me. Every time I peruse its contents, I come across something I missed before.
This time it was a 1944 piece in Collier’s Magazine by author Kyle Crichton. Written after the horrific flood of 1943, which led to the policies that manage the Missouri River today, it offered a description of the river that has repeated itself over and over for decades, most recently in the Flood of 2019.
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“The Missouri is the mad elephant of rivers,†Crichton . “Once a year and sometimes oftener it comes charging out of the mountains of Montana through the fertile Middle West in a roaring, insane torrent that overwhelms farms, railroads, towns and humans. Homeless families sleep in schoolhouses and churches until the water subsides and they can return to look at the ruin of their lives. Some manage to start over again; others surrender in the face of a disaster that seems to delight in repeating itself. The two floods of 1943 did damage estimated at 63 million dollars.
“Army engineers perform prodigies in a technical battle they can never win. They widen channels, build jetties, construct dikes. But when the inevitable floods come, the massive jetties are crushed, the fertile lands along the river banks are denuded to fill the channels with silt and little towns bury their dead with the silent fatalism of habit.â€
That last phrase — the silent fatalism of habit — could describe the political reaction to Missouri River flooding virtually every year since 1943. That flood was similar to the one this year that already covered portions of South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri in slow rising water fed by larger than normal snow melt. It came in waves, and round two is likely coming after the most recent April “bomb cyclone†dumped feet of snow in the Dakotas, Montana and Minnesota.
Then, as now, policy makers thought they could tame the river by building bigger and better levees, more dams and other man-made structures.
It’s never been so, writes David Stokes.
Last week, Stokes, executive director of the , wrote letters to Missouri’s congressional delegation and Gov. Mike Parson, urging them to learn the lessons the river has been teaching us for decades.
Parson met with other river basin governors to discuss flooding recently, and many of those governors, such as Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, are calling for levees.
That’s precisely the wrong solution, Stokes wrote.
“As we attempt to address the devastation caused by the flooding, it is imperative that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past,†Stokes wrote. “Calls to address the flood disaster by rebuilding levees even higher than they were previously and adding new levees onto our overly channelized river system are counterproductive and must be resisted. Massive spending on new dams and levees will make future floods even worse, not better.â€
In his letter, Stokes went further back in history to make his point, referencing a congressional report filed by an engineer named Charles Ellet in 1852. He was tasked by the War Department to study consistent flooding of the Mississippi River, particularly in the New Orleans area, as it was creating security and economic consequences for the nation.
Ellet called for “higher and stronger†levees in and around the most populated areas in the Delta, but with one huge caveat: the real key to flood control, he said, is to “reclaim the swamps,†to give the river multiple outlets and “relief valves.â€
In other words, give the river room to roam.
That was the same conclusion Gen. Gerald Galloway of the Army Corps of Engineers reached 150 years later when he and a team of scientists studied the 1993 flood that devastated the Midwest in many of the same ways we are experiencing today. Stop developing in floodplains, the report said. . As much as possible, return the river to its natural state, even if it means buying up farmland and shuttering entire river towns.
Ellet was ignored. So was Galloway, mostly.
Twenty-first century politicians appear to be poised to make the same mistakes their predecessors made, trying to tame the mad elephant out of fatalistic habit.
Don’t do it, Stokes urges.
“We look to you and your fellow Missouri elected officials to lead Missouri in a direction toward giving our great rivers room to spread, as nature intended them to do,†he wrote. “Attempting to address a disaster caused by floodplain development and river management with even more development and management will condemn our region to repeating these mistakes over and over.â€