最新杏吧原创

It鈥檚 spring rise season in the Missouri River Basin, and that means from Clarksville to Cairo, from Hannibal to Hamburg, residents of river towns are nervous about what comes next. Because of heavier than normal snowpack, early rain and 鈥� yes 鈥� climate change 鈥� both the Missouri and Mississippi rivers are swelling, likely to top their banks in some locations in coming days and weeks.

At the confluence of the two great rivers, just north of 最新杏吧原创, a slow-motion head-on crash is coming.

Last week, four separate times, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced from the Gavins Point Dam in Yankton, S.D., from 50,000 cubic feet per second to 60,000, then 90,000, and 100,000, knowing full well that the massive amount of water it was sending downstream would cause flooding.

鈥淲e know there are communities experiencing flooding, or nearing that condition, along the Missouri downstream of our dams,鈥� said John Remus, chief of the Corps鈥� Missouri River Water Management Division in Omaha, Neb. 鈥淲e are managing releases from Gavins Point as judiciously as we can in order to lessen the impact downstream.鈥�

For veterans of flooding seasons in the Missouri River Basin, this is like an early warning system.

Strap in. With even an average amount of rain, this spring is going to be a soggy, and potentially deadly, one.

Already, upstream in Sioux Falls, S.D., a local television station had to cancel two days of broadcasts because it鈥檚 not safe for its employees to get to work. Roads are turning into rivers. The situation is symbolic of the constant push and pull of the human-made navigation problems along the Missouri River, designed with the Pick-Sloan Plan in 1944 that seeks to balance competing interests with a series of dams, dikes and constrictions that won鈥檛 let the river do what it wants to, which is move.

Upstream snowpack leads to flooding, which requires release of water from reservoirs, to slowly flow downstream and cause more flooding. Upstream and downstream the finger-pointing begins, at the Corps, at Congress, at environmentalist and farmers, at each other.

Part of the historic problem with seasonal flooding in the Missouri River Basin is that everybody acts in their own self interest, particularly when it comes to developing in the floodplain, taking away the land where the water wants to go. After floods, we build levees bigger, rather than tearing them down and giving the river room to flow.

This year is no exception.

鈥淢aryland Heights just approved a new floodplain development as all of this is happening,鈥� notes David Stokes, executive director of the . There are other developments on the horizon, too; in the city of St. Charles, in Lincoln County, on the northern edge of the city of 最新杏吧原创, where Mississippi River land that regularly floods was raised up several feet with very little oversight.

鈥淭hese cities are never going to learn,鈥� Stokes says, 鈥渂ecause they are not going to pass on potential sales tax revenue based on the risk that they are pushing the water on to somebody else.鈥�

It鈥檚 not just the cities.

For years now, Congress has known its National Flood Insurance Program was broken, in part because every time the experts suggest what needs to happen 鈥� homeowners and businesses in high-risk areas paying the actual cost of development 鈥� wealthy interests squawk and nothing gets done. The national insurance program is functionally bankrupt. It is kept afloat only because Congress has passed a .

It鈥檚 going to get worse before it gets better. If not this spring, then next, or the one after that.

In Missouri alone there were or emergencies related to flooding or severe storms just between 2000 and 2015, according to the Pew Charitable Trust鈥檚 Flood Prepared Communities program, leading to more than $870 million in federal aid. Climate change is increasing the severity and frequency of such floods, say experts like Washington University鈥檚 Bob Criss.

Like Stokes, Criss laments that policymakers never learn.

We fight floods when they come, banding together to save lives and property, and then we go back to making the same old mistakes, and costing taxpayers billions of dollars in the process.

鈥淲e lived through the Flood of 1993, and nobody learned,鈥� Stokes says.

Indeed, what was then called Gumbo Flats was underwater for weeks. Now the shiny Chesterfield Valley is home to two outlet malls built with tax subsidies, and one of them has already failed. After 1993, the Galloway Report suggested about 100 different things for policymakers to do to mitigate the damages from the next big flood. Most of the suggestions were ignored.

More than a quarter-century later, the emotions in river country rise and fall like the hulking Big Muddy beast, hoping sunny days are on the horizon.