By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
The US Army Corps of Engineers is receiving infrastructure funding that will give a boost to projects along the Missouri River, especially to rebuild and improve the Missouri River levee system heavily damaged in the 2019 flood.
The Kansas City district of the Corps is set to receive $278 million dollars in infrastructure funding from the infrastructure package approved by Congress.
Program Manager for Missouri River Navigation and Restoration Dane Morris says the levees will not only be rebuilt, but improved.
"We are going back to modify and make those structures more sustainable," Morris tells reporters during a conference call. "We're going to both be building the structures up to reduce flow into those side channel chutes so that more water is pushed into the navigation channel, to make those projects more sustainable."
Much of the repair on the Missouri River will shore up dykes and stabilize the bank of the Missouri River between Rulo, Nebraska and St. Louis, which is within the Corps' Kansas City district.
Morris says close to $248 million dollars of these funds will go towards Missouri River infrastructure repairs.
"The funds that are being provided in the infrastructure bill are primarily to restore the functionality of the channel to what it was pre-2019, so prior to that high water event," Morris says. "We've been approaching these repairs in three phases; the first phase was to repair and remove the known restrictions to the navigation channel."
The repairs being made by the Corps are currently in the second phase, in which they are rebuilding the navigation system to pre-flood conditions.
Morris says this large amount of funding will help tremendously with the needed repairs.
"This amount of funding is a much larger slug of funds then we have received previously for repairs or maintenance along the river," Morris says. "So, I think it is going to go a long way in helping stabilize the river and repair the navigation channel to what is was prior to the flood."
Morris says typically the Corps budget for repairs is around $10 million dollars, so having $248 million to work with is a huge boost.