By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
United States Army Corps of Engineers officials say conditions are ripe for additional flooding this year.
The Corps says there is an average to above-average risk for flooding along the Missouri River this spring. That follows the 2019 flood, which Jud Kneuvean with the Corps’ Kansas City office recalls as one of the worst floods in the history of the office.
“Longest flood in our district’s history,” Kneuvean says. “We declared a flood event on March 13th and then we declared the end of the event on December 16th; so, 279 days.”
Kneuvean says the Corps has received 119 total requests for assistance to repair broken levees. The Corps expects to complete a total of 72 projects, but many might not be completed until next year.
Kneuvean understands many southern Buchanan County residents worry about whether Highway 59 will remain open to the Amelia Earhart Bridge over the Missouri River.
“We’ve been in Rushville several times and now we’re actually looking to see if we can do some maybe temporary measures this spring to at least keep the highway open between Rushville and Atchison,” Kneuvean says.
Broken levees and saturated soil make northwest Missouri and northeast Kansas vulnerable to renewed flooding.
Soil moisture is a bit concern this spring. It cannot absorb the upper Missouri River basin runoff expected this spring. Average runoff, according to the Corps of Engineers, is 25.3-to-25.7 million acre-feet of water. The early season projection for runoff stands at 36.3 million acre-feet, approximately 141% of normal.
Many compared the 2019 flood to the 1993 flood.
That works, as far as it goes.
Kneuvean says there is one difference between the two floods which stands out.
“Two thousand nineteen was very equivalent to 1993. The difference was, 1993 came to us in about 57 days and the 2019 event was 279 days,” Kneuvean says. “So, it was a duration event.”
Both floods did incredible damage to the Missouri River levee system. And, as in 1993, it will take some time to restore the levees.
“And we’ve said from about the middle of last summer that we would not have everything repaired by spring and that it could take us up until the summer of 2021 to get everything back in place, which is every equivalent to what happened in 1993,” according to Kneuvean.