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Environment
Blowing Up Birds Point: The Army Corps of Engineers Gets One Right

By Michael Grunwald
Monday, May 2, 2011

I have an unhealthy obsession with the ecologically destructive boondoggles of the Army Corps of Engineers, the dysfunctional water resources agency that drowned New Orleans. And one of the most ludicrous Corps projects is located in Missouri’s soggy southeastern bootheel, right where the agency dynamited a Mississippi River levee Monday that will flood 130,000 acres of farmland. But I’m not going to use this opportunity to re-trash the project. Yet.

First, I’m going to give the Corps some props. It’s going to take a lot of flak for its controversial decision to blow up the Birds Point levee, but it’s doing the right thing. And it’s redeeming some ugly history.

Nobody likes to flood farmland on purpose, but this particular farmland is in a floodway. After the catastrophic flood of 1927, when the swollen Mississippi River had no room to spread out, Congress designated this sparsely inhabited area to be sacrificed in case the river ever rose that high again. The idea was to keep the river from overwhelming the levees protecting the population of Cairo, Ill.

Well, the “project flood” is here. It’s been here for several days, but the handful of predominantly white and well-off landowners around Bird Point and their allies in Missouri politics persuaded the Corps to hold off for a while, and filed lawsuits to try to force the Corps to back off. Meanwhile, the 3,000 predominantly black and poor residents of Cairo have been waiting in fear. But now the Corps has acted to save them.

I suppose the Corps shouldn’t get too much credit for doing its job; it may even be too late to save Cairo’s levees. But when the river rose in 1927, as my friend John Barry chronicled in his brilliant history Rising Tide, the Corps blew up a levee and drowned poor black communities in order to save the property of rich whites. So this is a welcome reversal.

That said, before this flood, the Corps was still pushing ahead with its preposterous St. John’s Bayou-New Madrid Floodway project, which would promote more development in the floodway and make it much harder to do the right thing during the next flood. I’ll tell the story of the St. John’s project in a future post, hopefully after the waters subside.

CAT Tracks Editor's Note:

The article above was actually a link embedded in a more detailed blog about the Army Corps of Engineers and their operation of Missouri floodways.

The link to the original article...

More from Michael Grunwald on the Missouri Floodway

Now...

Giving Missouri 8th District Representative Jo Ann Emerson her due...

From the Dexter Daily Statesman.

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Big River, Little City

By Jo Ann Emerson
MO Eighth District Representative

Posted Friday, May 6, 2011, at 10:59 AM

The floods which have ravaged the Eighth Congressional District in Missouri and the midsection of the entire country are serious business. These storms and floods have killed hundreds of people, injured hundreds more, destroyed homes and businesses, and forever changed the topography of our part of the nation. Entire communities are besieged by floodwaters, the flood protection system up and down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers is under unprecedented strain, and we face a disaster of major proportion.

To read big-city newspapers, however, is to grossly misunderstand what is happening in our congressional district. They leave readers with the impression that flooding along the Mississippi River is the only cause for concern, leaving out inland floods like those along the White River, the Black River, and at Wappapello and Clearwater Lakes. Our congressional district is half the size of the state of Indiana, but today it is more appropriate to phrase the comparison differently: we are twice the size of Lake Erie.

Another simplification common to the national press coverage of the flooding of the New Madrid floodway is that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers faced a choice between saving people in Cairo, Illinois and farmland in Missouri. By that math, the choice ought to be easy, right? But in fact, there are communities in the New Madrid floodway where families make their homes, people go to work, and businesses have buildings and assets. From the agricultural activities in the New Madrid floodway, hundreds of millions of dollars in economic value is added to our state.

A blogger/reporter from Time magazine even went so far as to say that blowing up the Birds Point levee and flooding 130,000 acres in Missouri was a good thing because "predominantly white and well-off landowners" would suffer while "predominantly black and poor residents of Cairo" would be saved. In Michael Grunwald's ill-considered words, "This is a welcome reversal." The word despicable comes to mind, but those remarks also sadden me for the residents of Pinhook, Missouri, the African-American community which is home to most all of the residents in the New Madrid floodway. For years and years, we have been fighting to improve the levees that would keep annual floodwaters out of Pinhook, water that forces children there to ride to school in flatbed trailers rather than buses. When Mr. Grunwald's "justice" was served, their homes were destroyed. There is no better advertisement for the ignorance and insensitivity of mainstream media.

Finally, you might be tempted to believe from the headlines that the danger has passed, and this is not the case, either. Floodwaters remain at historic levels for historic durations. We will be anxiously watching weather forecasts for home and for upriver in weeks and maybe months to come. It will be a long time before floodwaters recede. Most serious is the fact that a strained flood protection system made up of levees, locks and dams is even further challenged by its age. The reluctance to modernize our system is the result of tough times for state, local and federal budgets, but the zealotry of environmental extremists who would rather revert our floodplain to fish habitat plays a role in public policy, too.