By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Midland Empire residents are being encouraged to give their input to an Army Corps of Engineers study to lower the risk of flooding along the Missouri River.
The Corps is holding a series of public meetings to gather input. The first, Monday, was held in Council Bluffs, Iowa. A second will be held Tuesday evening in Nebraska City.
Corps Program Manager of the Lower Missouri River studies, Colleen Roberts, says the Corps will begin the meetings with a short presentation, but will mostly be listening to residents along the river.
“Just be able to document and have the conversation with them on the way they see the river versus how we see it and get their first-hand experiences with it,” Roberts tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post in an interview.
The Corps is working on what is officially called the Lower Missouri River Basin Flood Risk and Resiliency Study. It will look at the flood risks along the entire 735 miles of the lower Missouri River from Rulo, Nebraska to St. Louis.
Roberts says this is a unique study with the public invited to contribute early in the process.
“It’s not anything we’ve done before,” Roberts says. “And pretty early in the process to be able to get people’s input on the problem areas.”
Corps Community Planner Ginger Niemann-Harper says the study is an outgrowth of the governors of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa getting together to call for something different be done to end recurring Missouri River flooding.
“To look at the flood devastation, look at the problem areas and come up with a solution that gets us moving forward toward that system resiliency and towards some solutions for communities up and down the river,” Niemann-Harper says during the interview.
The governors of the four states met in an effort to provide a unified voice calling for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to make changes seen as vital to end a cycle of flooding that began in 1993, recurred in 2011 as well as 2019.
Niemann-Harper says this is an opportunity for the Corps to look at the Missouri River system as a whole and hear from those most affected by Missouri River flooding.
“And to get some folks together that may not have always learned about each other’s problems or learned about each other’s areas of the river, learned about how the river is used in different areas and try to come up with solutions that benefit a larger area and more people,” according to Niemann-Harper.
The Corps does plan some spin-off studies on specific sites, including studies in Holt County, Brunswick, and Jefferson City.
The meeting tonight will begin at 5:30 in the Morton-James Public Library in Nebraska City. On Wednesday, the Corps will hold a meeting at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources in Jefferson City. Thursday, the Corps will hold a meeting in the Ferrell Academic Center at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.
Click HERE for more on the Lower Missouri River Basin Flood Risk and Resiliency Study and the scheduled scoping meetings.
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