Second of three parts
The first part is at thevoice.us/approaches-new-to-annual-mississippi-river-floods
Jenny Rogers wrote the following article for Nature Conservancy Magazine.
Part one’s focus was on new approaches to solve annual Mississippi River floods.
“As floods throughout the Mississippi River Basin become more destructive and unpredictable, communities are changing tactics to give the water a place to go.
“Numerous agencies, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, along with environmental groups such as The Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited and others, are working with communities to find ways to reduce extreme flooding and restore some of the floodplains the rivers once relied on. And the communities themselves are increasingly advocating for living with the river rather than fighting it.
“At the November 2019 meeting in Atchison County, an Army Corps representative named Dave Crane, presented two options to the group for repairing or replacing the pair of federal levees that had collapsed. The Corps could plug the holes in both of them. Or, it could rebuild them farther back from the main navigation channel of the River, on what was mostly private land. That would let the river spread out during floods, keeping the water levels lower.
“Ottmann, from the levee district, spoke in favor of a setback. ‘You have a 67-year-old levee that is damaged,’ he told the group. ‘We have a broken system—not just in the breaches.’ Maybe, instead of the status quo, they, like many other communities in the Mississippi River basin, needed a change.
“The main stem of the Mississippi River has connected humans for millennia. People of the Mississippian Culture grew food and traded along the River. Since the 1800s, barges have carried goods up and down the River for shipping out of New Orleans to the rest of the world. And from New Orleans to Memphis to St. Louis and onward to Minneapolis, the river has been a common thread across culturally diverse regions.
“Rain that falls from Ohio to Montana to Louisiana eventually meets in the Mississippi River; it is the product of more than 300,000 miles of smaller rivers, creeks, and streams, poured into one. Without human intervention, the Mississippi would, like all rivers, change paths over time, altering its meandering curves as it eroded away land. Spring rains would drive pulses of water downriver, flooding nutrients over its banks to create fertile plains or forests. More nutrients and sediment would travel south to wetlands at the mouth of the River on the Gulf of Mexico.
“But in 1928, after an historic flood, the federal government authorized the Army Corps to begin a massive program to build levees and dams on the river. Today, 80% to 85% of the Mississippi River from Davenport, Iowa, to the Gulf of Mexico is leveed, disconnected from its floodplain, according to Gretchen Benjamin, TNC’s large-river specialist. That infrastructure did its main job of keeping water inside the River for decades. But increasingly frequent floods, like those in 1993, 2008, 2011, and 2019, have made life on the river more dangerous.
“In many ways, the modern Mississippi is more a highway than a river. It is continually managed to maintain a navigation channel for the barges that carry more than 500 million tons of cargo annually. ‘We really don’t let it function like a natural river,’ said Benjamin. ‘It’s highly manipulated for people.’
“Benjamin grew up five blocks from the Mississippi in a Minnesota town that didn’t have a levee at the time. Now, like many living in the northern reaches of the River, she uses kayaks on it and visits it with her family. The River is part of a wildlife refuge there, a different beast than the leveed stretches to the south.”
Continued at https://thevoice.us/river-help-wetland-restoration-flood-warning-system