By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Repair work continues on the Missouri River levee system and not just on the Missouri side.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is nearing completion of reconstruction of the Iowa Point, Kansas levee, heavily damaged by the 2019 flood.
“In March of 2019 that levee was overtopped and then subsequently breached,” Emergency Management Specialist Mike Dulin with the Army Corps of Engineers Kanas City office tells St. Joseph Post.
The three-and-a-half mile levee that held in 2011, failed in 2019; spectacularly.
“There were three breaches on it resulting from the flood as well as a large drainage structure on the downstream end of the levee system that had three 60-inch CMP pipes that drained the bottoms there,” Dulin says. “Our contractors had to reconstruct that on site and do some work to realign the drainage channel.”
Officially called the Missouri River Levee System 500R, it was designed and built by the Corps of Engineers and turned over to the Iowa Point Levee District in northern Doniphan County, Kansas.
Missouri River floodwater poured through the breaches in the levee and covered 1,300 acres of farmland in northern Doniphan County in 2019. It also damaged Highway 7 between Sparks and White Cloud.
“It overtopped and breached and then the floodplain bottoms there were inundated a couple of more times throughout the flood event in ’19 just due to high water on the Missouri River,” according to Dulin. “So, it also caused a lot of damage to Highway 7 there on the north end of the levee unit where it ties into the highway.”
The Corps worked with the Kansas Department of Transportation to repair and elevate Highway 7.
Dulin says it was not just the height of the Missouri River, but the duration of the flood, that devastated levees throughout the area. That portion of the river got hit hard, as hard as any portion of Missouri River bottomland in 2019. Dulin says the Missouri River didn’t discriminate that year, overflowing in Missouri as well as Kansas. Floodwaters damaged the Iowa Point levee on the Kansas side and damaged levees across the river in Missouri, including the Canon Drainage District, Holt County Levee District Number 9, Holt County Levee District Number 10, as well as the Union Township and Corning levee systems.
Dulin says the breaches of the Iowa Point, Kansas levee should be repaired in the next couple of weeks. Other finishing touches will need to be completed to fully restore the levee.