'93 flood focuses river strategy on natural flows
Efforts include letting Missouri River reclaim natural meanderings, floodplains

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- In the summer of 1993, the jet stream parked itself over the nation's heartland and began funneling a succession of powerful thunderstorms through the region drained by several key tributaries of the Mississippi River, including the lower Missouri.

Meteorologists call this phenomenon the "train effect." In June and July of that year, the "train" of storms, arriving one after the other, day after day, dumped prodigious amounts of precipitation onto river basins already soggy from higher-then-usual spring rainfall. As a result, record floodwaters surged simultaneously down the lower Missouri and upper Mississippi, blowing out mile after mile of protective agricultural levees and inundating scores of riverfront communities.

At its peak, the flow at St. Louis, 12 miles south of the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi, was measured at more than 1 million cubic feet a second -- enough water roaring past the downtown floodwalls to fill the Los Angeles Coliseum from turf to rim in about a minute.

According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the floods killed at least 38 people, forced 74,000 to flee, and destroyed or damaged 72,000 homes. Between 35,000 and 45,000 commercial structures were damaged. Millions of acres of cropland were inundated for weeks during the growing season, and thousands of acres of topsoil were washed away or buried by sand and thereby ruined for farming. Total losses were estimated at more than $15 billion. The Federal Emergency Management Agency declared 504 counties in nine states eligible for disaster assistance.

"The flood of 1993 was the worst flood ever experienced by the Midwest. From the standpoint of monetary loss, it was the worst ever in the United States," the COE concluded in its report on the events of that summer. "No other natural disaster in U.S. history affected or touched so many lives for so long a duration."

What the Corps didn't realize at the time was that the floods had also damaged two things less tangible than levees but just as important in the Missouri valley's history: unquestioned faith in the COE's ability to control the nation's rivers, and the political willingness to sacrifice fish, wildlife and natural habitat to advance commerce.

One result of this change in perception is visible today along a stretch of the Missouri River shoreline that William Clark described in his journal as a "Delightfull land."

In harm's way

The headquarters of Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge are in a trailer in a parking lot at a U.S. Geological Survey research station in Columbia, Mo. It seemed appropriate that it was raining heavily outside as Barbara Moran, assistant refuge manager, spread maps and aerial photographs across a table to illustrate how the 1993 floods had changed the way federal agencies approach their management of the Missouri River.

In the wake of the 1993 floods, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the COE declared a natural disaster, Congress directed that emergency relief agencies put greater emphasis on "hazard mitigation" -- a fancy term for spending millions of dollars to move people and sometimes entire communities out of harm's way, rather than spending billions of dollars to repeatedly rebuild flood-damaged structures. It also meant buying out farmers whose fields might be better suited to growing birds than growing corn.

The policy shift reflected something critics of federal flood-control efforts had been asserting for decades: that what government agencies term a "natural disaster" is often not natural at all; it occurs when human beings place themselves deliberately in harm's way.

Unlike hurricanes and earthquakes, which occur over such widespread areas they can not reasonably be evaded unless substantial parts of the continent are left uninhabited, floods along big rivers are predictable -- they occur in the rivers' floodplains.

The floodplains of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers are vast; between Kansas City and St. Louis alone, the Missouri's encompasses 800,000 acres. Both waterways traverse relatively level topography and, in the early 19th century, both meandered a great deal while seeking the path of least resistance from headwaters to mouth. Where the river valleys are wide -- as in Iowa, near the present-day town of Onawa, where the Missouri once had 18 miles in which to roam -- the rivers made great loops, or bends. One such bend in that area, eventually left behind when the river cut a new channel, is now a lake at Lewis and Clark State Park, where replicas of the expedition's boats are moored.

Besides making numerous twists and turns, the Missouri and Mississippi (and their tributaries) were subject to enormous seasonal fluctuations -- a huge rise in spring and early summer, from melting snow and rain, and a great decline in late summer and fall. The plants and animals native to the river basins evolved to cope with and capitalize on that pattern.

Cottonwood trees, for example, produce tiny seeds that float on the floodwaters and are left behind to germinate in rich silt when the water recedes. Native fish, such as the pallid sturgeon and buffalo fish, instinctively sense the coming rise in the river and prepare to spawn, laying their eggs in the quiet sheets of water that spread over the flood plain.

For the farmers and homeowners who followed in the path of Lewis and Clark, however, the spring and summer rise meant flooding -- water that drowned crops planted in the rich floodplain soil, water that toppled houses and barns and businesses, water that washed out roads. And so they began demanding that the government do something about it. They were joined by commercial interests that viewed the inconstant waterways as potential shipping channels, if they could only eliminate shoals, sandbars, sunken trees and other hazards, and prevent the rivers from wandering so much.

The result was a vast public-works program intended to harness the river. Similar programs eventually would transform all the rivers Lewis and Clark traveled -- indeed, would transform every major river in the West.

The unruly river

On the Missouri, the COE began small, dispatching "snag boats" in 1838 to remove underwater obstructions to steamboats. Sunken trees, or snags, were a particular threat, frequently impaling and sinking steamers whose pilots could not see them. Historians estimate that during the steamboat era on the Missouri, which ended in the 1880s when the railroad arrived, nearly 1,000 boats went down in the river. Snags sank most of them.

As the steamboat era waned, local residents began lobbying Congress for help of a different kind, according to history professor Robert Kelley Schneiders, whose book "Unruly River" documents nearly 200 years of change along the Missouri.

"These lobbyists did not seek the reestablishment of steamboat commerce, recognizing that the steamers would never return to the lower Missouri as freight carriers," he wrote. "Instead, they wanted the federal government to channelize the Missouri to inaugurate deep-draft barge traffic. Only these barges, with their large cargo-carrying capacities, could conceivably compete against the railroads," which had a monopoly on transportation and could charge high rates.

Congress complied by directing the COE to begin transforming the lower river, defined as the reach between Sioux City, Iowa, and the Mississippi, into a barge channel.

To do so, the COE built a vast system of dikes, gradually confining the river to a narrower, deeper channel armored with rocks against erosion. The COE also straightened the river by cutting off its great bends, or meanders, dredging channels across their necks. The advantage of this had been illustrated more than a century earlier when Lewis and Clark journeyed up the Missouri by boat: After following one loop nearly 19 miles around, they returned on foot and measured the distance across its neck as only 974 yards.

As the Missouri settled into its narrower, straighter course, farmers moved into the floodplain, leveled its forests, built levees and planted crops. Cities, too, crept close to the new shipping channel, building on land reclaimed from the river.

The river corridor had once been a dynamic, chaotic collection of side channels, deep pools, sloughs, marshes, periodically flooded forests, sand bars, oxbow lakes, wet prairies. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the varied habitats supported at least 160 species of resident and migratory wildlife, and 156 native fish species lived in the main river and its tributaries.

Efforts to control the river did away with much of that abundance and diversity.

"Direct losses of at least 103,000 acres of aquatic habitat, 65,300 acres of islands and sandbars, 114,000 acres of seasonal and permanent wetlands, including wet prairies, and 194,000 acres of woodland habitats have occurred in the last century," according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "The river has been shortened 127 shoreline miles by channelization. More than 90 percent of the floodplain forests, wetlands and prairies have been converted to agricultural lands."

Despite the COE's effort to make the river navigable, it soon became clear that there was too little water in the Missouri during much of the year to maintain an adequate shipping channel in the lower river. As a result, commercial interests along the lower river began agitating for a network of dams on the upper river to control the flow. Periodic flooding also tore through growing cities and towns in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri, and the voices of inundated urbanites were added to the chorus calling for dams.

Congress responded, first by approving construction of Fort Peck Dam in Montana during the Depression, and later with the Flood Control Act of 1944, which authorized five huge dams along the Missouri River in North and South Dakota. Built between 1946 and 1963, those dams not only drowned hundreds of miles of the upper river beneath giant reservoirs, they put an end to the seasonal rise and fall of the lower river. Loss of that natural fluctuation contributed to the further decline of wildlife and plants that required periodic flooding to reproduce.

In the decades before passage of landmark environmental legislation such as the Endangered Species Act and the Environmental Policy Act, ecological damage was ignored. Or, if considered, regarded as an acceptable price to pay for the benefits in flood control, navigation and hydroelectric power generation brought by the COE's manipulation of the river.

That equation changed during the flood of 1993.

Giving something back

In her office at Big Muddy refuge headquarters, rain spattering the metal roof, Moran displayed maps and aerial photos depicting spots where the federal government purchased farmland, much of it heavily damaged by the great flood of 1993, and allowed it to return to a more natural condition. Workers breached levees so the river could flow back into old side channels and marshes. Volunteers planted vegetation and attacked noxious weeds. In many areas, Moran said, new cottonwoods and willows sprouted on their own.

"It seems very controlled and managed when you look at the river itself, but there's still a lot of wildness in the system," Moran said.

The theory behind the restoration is simple: Natural floodplains allow rivers to spread out and slow down when too much water pours into the system to be accommodated in the main channel. Trying to keep the river confined, as the COE had when it turned the lower Missouri into a barge channel, causes the water to rise higher and move faster during heavy runoff. This puts greater stress on protective levees and contributes to greater damage if they fail.

And as a presidential task force concluded after the 1993 disaster, levee failure is almost guaranteed.

"Floods are repetitive natural phenomena," the Interagency Floodplain Management Review Committee reported in 1994. "Considering the nation's short history of hydrologic record-keeping as well as the limited knowledge of long-term weather patterns, flood recurrence intervals are hard to predict. Activities in the floodplain, even with levee protection, continue to remain at risk."

Flood damage, the committee suggested, could be reduced if the river were given back some of what two centuries of engineering and tinkering had taken from it.

The task force, appointed by President Clinton and chaired by Brig. Gen. Gerald Galloway of the COE, also noted that loss of the floodplains (coupled with elimination of natural flow fluctuations by the big upstream dams) had meant loss of wildlife habitat. This in turn contributed to such great decline in some native species-- the piping plover, least tern and pallid sturgeon among them -- that they had been listed as endangered.

Even before 1993, federal agencies had begun trying to reverse the decline by restoring natural habitat along the Missouri, but the flooding gave new urgency to the process. It also brought new federal money. Congress made an emergency appropriation even before the water had receded that summer, directing it be used to buy out ruined farmers. Their former cropland was to form Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge (established in 1994), joining a score of restoration sites between Sioux City, Iowa, and St. Louis, Mo. Collectively, they are referred to as the Missouri River Fish and Wildlife Mitigation Project.

"The Missouri River mitigation is the process of trying to get back some of what was lost," Moran said.

At Big Muddy, the mitigation project eventually will return some 60,000 acres -- about 8 percent of the lower Missouri floodplain -- to a more natural state. Whether that will be enough to reduce flooding damage and improve the status of threatened and endangered species is unknown.

"There are so many variables," Moran said.

A "beautiful prospect"

Using aerial photos, Moran provided directions to Overton Bottoms, a large tract within the refuge where the COE had breached a levee and allowed the river to have its way. She suggested it would be a good place to see the restoration work in progress and to examine the flood's aftermath.

The site borders busy Interstate 70, just a few miles from refuge headquarters. Near the freeway bridge over the river, gravel roads lead out into the floodplain, which the recent rain had turned into a slippery expanse of sticky gumbo mud -- the kind that collects on boots and tires, and forms great clots on every inch of a vehicle's body.

One gravel road ends near a huge "scour hole" created in 1993 when the flooding river crashed through a levee nearby, gouging an enormous pit as it roared through the breach. The hole had since become a pond inhabited by fish and birds.

The air was alive with mosquitoes, and heavy with the smells of decaying vegetation and mud. A dense forest of cottonwoods and willows had sprouted, taking over the sand-buried land where crops had grown just eight years before. Elsewhere, marsh and wet prairie were being established. Tall grasses, wet with recent rain and infested by ticks, drooped in the damp air.

Given the COE's history along the Missouri, the notion that it has begun breaching levees so the river can flood rich bottomland seems little short of revolutionary. Yet environmental organizations are pressing for even more radical changes in river management.

Noting that the COE's own figures reveal that hardly any commercial barge traffic uses the lower Missouri, river activists have suggested that the dams in Montana and the Dakotas should be operated in such as way as to mimic natural fluctuations in seasonal flows -- a spring rise and a summer decline -- rather than exclusively to benefit nearly nonexistent barges.

According to American Rivers, a nonprofit advocacy group, Missouri River barges carry only 0.3 percent of all the grain harvested each year in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri, and produce only $6.9 million in annual economic benefits for the basin. On average, the group says, only one to three barge tows per day may be found in the 735 channelized miles of the lower Missouri River.

Like many other organizations, American Rivers seeks to capitalize on the Lewis and Clark bicentennial by dubbing its restoration proposal the "Voyage of Recovery." Besides calling for a return to natural flow patterns (which USFWS also has endorsed as critical to save imperiled species) the campaign proposes additional ecological restoration and urban riverfront revitalization along the entire Missouri.

The COE has spent more than a decade studying possible revisions in its dam operations. So far, it has been noncommittal, suggesting initially that it might be prepared to endorse the concept of a spring rise but then declining to do so in an environmental review of the proposal issued last summer. The agency is expected to issue a final decision this summer.

Meanwhile, nature continues to reclaim parts of the Big Muddy refuge, a landscape that greatly delighted the usually terse journalist William Clark when he and his companions explored it 200 years ago.

From a bluff in the vicinity, he said, "the most butiful prospect of the River up & down and the country Opsd. presented it Self which I ever beheld; The River meandering the open and butifull Plains interspursed with Groves of timber."

The Missouri will never again be what it was when the Corps of Discovery passed this way -- too few meanders and open plains, too many cornfields and gas stations -- but hints of its wildness remain. If invited to do so, as it has been at Overton Bottoms, the old river will reassert itself.

And sometimes, as it showed in 1993, it won't wait for an invitation.