USA: Farmers and officials in Illinois and Missouri are desperately battling floodwaters along the Mississippi River. They’re also battling each other.
By Patrick M. O'Connell
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The pitched battle over the patchwork of human-made levees designed to control the [Mississippi River] has led one environmental group, American Rivers, to name a section of the river, from Muscatine, Iowa, to Hamburg, Ill., about 75 miles northwest of St. Louis, one of America’s 10 “most endangered rivers.”
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The way American Rivers frames the issue, a series of “illegal” levees along both sides of the river in three states, Illinois, Iowa and Missouri, is threatening more than 170,000 acres of flood plain and farmland, increasing the flood risk for farmers, small towns and cities along the banks, inundating riverside habitats and changing the flow of the river.
The environmental group’s main gripe is that levees are being built too high — “raised” is the term used — without the required permits and approvals. Combined with other man-made navigation structures, such as wing dikes, dams and locks, the infrastructure, even if made of sand and earth, is changing the character of the river and the surrounding habitat, said Eileen Shader of American Rivers.
But many of the levee districts, the agencies in control of many of the earthen berms up and down the river, say they are not only operating in good faith and within the law, but operating to protect the farms, towns, houses and roadways that dot the landscape along the Mississippi. And those on the Illinois side are skeptical about the bellyaching from their counterparts across the river, questioning why they are being blamed for natural disasters caused by heavier recent rainfall and a pulsing river.
Mike Reed, the superintendent of the Sny Island levee district, said “flood control works,” and he simply disagrees that levees are making matters worse along the river. The Sny Island levee, Reed said, protects interstates 72 and 172 near Quincy, the highway bridges from Illinois into Hannibal and the town of Louisiana in Missouri, two cross-country railroad lines and several towns, in addition to farmland. Since the record flood of 1993, he said, the district has only raised its levees in a way that would affect the water level downstream in Missouri one other time, in 2008, and that action was by the books because of emergency declarations.
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