Rural Issue

Missouri River meetings ‘frustrating’

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been holding meetings up and down the Missouri River to discuss 2011 flooding problems and its plans for 2012.

Percival, Iowa farmer Leo Ettleman, a spokesman for a coalition called Responsible River Management, describes those meetings as “frustrating”.  Ettleman says the Corps is listening, but at this point, isn’t planning any changes.

“They look at 2012 as a 500-year event and they have no reason to change their management plans over one 500-year event,” Ettleman says, “so 2012 will be managed the same as it has been in the past.”

Ettleman says any changes to the Corps’ Missouri River operating plan will have to be made by Congress.  “And we’ve also run into issues on this flood recovery as to getting our levees built back to the 100-year protection level that they were—there’s no funding available there in the Corps,” he says.

Ettleman lost two-thirds of his 23-hundred row crop acres to the flooding in 2011.  He says it has left a tremendous amount of debris and sand deposits on his land.

“We have sand deposits probably anywhere from two foot to four foot deep—just waves of sand,” says Etttleman, “and scour holes—we have scour holes anywhere from two foot to five foot deep throughout our fields.”

And Ettleman is concerned about a repeat of the problems in 2012. “We’re going into the spring with a 25-year protection levee—granted they get it done by spring,” he says. “We are going to be extremely vulnerable in 2012 and perhaps even beyond—depends on when the funding comes in.”

Ettleman says because the number of people directly affected by the flooding is relatively small, it has been a challenge to make their voices heard.

AUDIO: Leo Ettleman (8:30 MP3)