By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
The flood which has tortured this area for most of the year has ended, officially.
While floodwaters can still be observed here and there in northwest Missouri and southwest Iowa, the Missouri River has fallen below flood stage at all the gauges monitored by the Omaha and Kansas City offices of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the first time since March 13th.
“Two hundred, seventy-nine days of flood-fighting activity; so last Wednesday I believe it was, we saw the final river gauge on the Missouri River in our district drop out of flood stage and that was at Waverly, Missouri,” Emergency Management Specialist Mike Dulin with the Corps’ Kansas City office tells St. Joseph Post.
The Army Corps of Engineers has ended emergency operations and returned to normal operations now that the river has dropped.
Now, repairs can gain some steam.
Dulin says this flood shared similarities with both the 1993 flood and the 2011 flood, leaving similar damage in its wake.
“As the river was running high all summer long, there were a lot of areas that were inaccessible still, so we couldn’t get out and do damage surveys and things like that on the levees,” Dulin says. “Fortunately, now that the river has dropped below flood stage it’s given the flood plains and the bottoms a chance to dry out.”
This flood wrecked the Missouri River levee system, though the swollen Missouri River did not top the levee protecting Rosecrans Memorial Airport in St. Joseph along with Elwood and Wathena, Kansas as it did in 1993.
The Missouri River set a new record this year, rising to 32.12 feet on the 22nd of March, a tad bit higher than the previous record set on July 26th of 1993. The Missouri fell below flood stage this year on December 7th, according to the National Weather Service.
Dulin says the lower Missouri River will allow contractors to begin moving dirt on 70 levee rehabilitation projects no later than next spring.
“That being said, it’s very unlikely that we’ll have any complete repairs done by next flood season,” Dulin says. “We could start seeing complete repairs on some levees by August/September of next summer. Then, overall, given the magnitude of the situation and how bad the damages are this could be up to a two-year project to complete all levee repairs in the district.”
Dulin says the Missouri River now likely will level out through the remainder of the winter.