Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) — For the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe,
whose lands straddle the North and South Dakota border, river
water means drinking supplies. For Illinois farmers, it’s
irrigation for their crops.
Rivers also power hydro-electric plants, provide recreation
for boaters and give coal companies inexpensive access to export
markets with barges to New Orleans.
Balancing these competing demands on the nation’s water
resources has never been easy. Global warming, linked to near-
record low water levels on the Mississippi River this year as
well as last year’s severe floods along the Missouri River, is
making the task even harder.
“You end up pitting one constituency against another, and
then you mud-wrestle over the right balance,” Ben Grumbles,
president of the Washington-based environmental group U.S. Water
Alliance, said. “Climate change means water change.”
It may also mean more disputes such as the one that erupted
in recent weeks in the Midwest. Shippers and political leaders
from along the Mississippi River’s midsection asked the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers to adjust its dams so more Missouri
River water would flow into the drought-shrunken Mississippi,
keeping barges moving on the nation’s busiest waterway. States
along the upper Missouri opposed that and the Army Corps
refused.
Rock Blasting
The agency did on Dec. 15 begin to increase the flow from
Carlyle Lake on the Kaskaskia River system in Southwest
Illinois, something it said may add six inches of water to the
lowest point of the Mississippi. It also expedited the planned
blasting of riverbed rock structures south of St. Louis, work
that is expected to begin today. Waterway groups say dramatic
action is needed to keep billions of dollars worth of grain,
coal and other goods moving if, as projected, water levels fall
to record lows at the end of this month.
In its letter to Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat,
the Army Corps cited other uses for the river as reasons for not
meeting the shippers’ demands. Irrigation, fish and wildlife
habitat, recreation and drinking water would all be harmed by
releasing the water, the Army Corps wrote. Lower reservoir
levels also threatened to expose and possibly damage artifacts
from American Indian tribes, it said.
Climate Change
The government will increasingly need to referee such
disputes as average temperatures in much of the U.S. may
increase by five degrees Fahrenheit by the 2080s, straining
river systems, Grumbles said. Earlier thaws and smaller
snowpacks will decrease flows from mountains. Increased
evaporation rates will dry out some areas and create excess
rainfall in others, resulting in more volatile water levels and
more frequent floods and droughts, according to the
Environmental Protection Agency.
Carbon-dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution
have led to a warming of the Earth’s temperature, which
threatens to cause extreme weather, drought and coastal
flooding, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
The pressure on waterways is a nationwide problem. In the
Colorado River basin serving cities including Denver, Los
Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix, strains of meeting a growing
population will persist for at least the next 50 years, the
Interior Department said in a study released last week. The
waterway’s seven-state region provides water to some 40 million
people, a number that may nearly double by 2060, the study said.
Meeting that region’s needs will “take diligent planning
and collaboration from all stakeholders,” Interior Secretary
Ken Salazar said in a statement. Still, tapping the Missouri or
other rivers to supplement Colorado basin flows, one idea
proposed to relieve pressures, isn’t “feasible,” he said in a
teleconference.
‘Increasingly Intense’
Conflicts over the Missouri’s waters “will be increasingly
intense over the years ahead with climate change and what is
expected to be more severe cycles of moisture,” said Bernard
Shanks, a fellow at the Mill Valley, California-based Resource
Renewal Institute.
In 2004, drought concerns prompted a revision of the manual
the Army Corps uses to judge how much of the Missouri’s water to
hold back in giant reservoirs. Rules require enough reserve to
handle a 12-year drought. About 20 percent of that amount is
expected to be drawn down this year alone, according to Jody
Farhat, chief of Missouri River basin management for the Army
Corps. Farhat said she is now planning for the “long game, not
the immediate future.”
Impaired Navigation
Shippers and carriers still want Missouri River water.
“There is the real chance that navigation could at best be
severely impaired, and at worst effectively shut down, for an
extended period of time if necessary actions are not taken
immediately,” American Waterways Operators President Tom
Allegretti said in a statement on Dec. 7. A closing would
imperil farm exports and fertilizer shipments needed by February
for U.S. spring planting, he said.
The setback for shipping interests is a shift from river-
management priorities that dominated the 20th century, said
Robert Kelley Schneiders, an environmental consultant at
EcoInTheKnow in Boulder, Colorado, who has written books about
the Missouri.
As far back as the 1800s, the barge industry has always
held powerful sway over river use, he said. The current dam
system itself was created to promote shipping along the lower
Missouri, which has never been realized, Schneiders said.
Still, 20th-century dreams of dictating a river’s path have
proven difficult. The Missouri River, the nation’s longest, has
continued to rebel, despite the construction of six main dams
along the waterway from the 1940s through the 1960s. Elwood,
Kansas, was submerged by floodwaters in 1993, and flooding last
year caused an estimated $5 billion in damage.
Unexpected Drought
“In June of 2011 I never would have expected a drought to
follow,” Shanks said.
Meanwhile, a recreation industry has grown up along
reservoirs. Cities and farmers rely on the rivers for clean
water and irrigation. The rights of American Indians, an
afterthought in initial plans, have gained prominence, as have
concerns about wildlife habit and soil erosion. Even hydraulic
fracturing, the technology that’s fueling an oil and gas boom in
North Dakota, will increasingly require Missouri River water,
said Michelle Klose, assistant engineer for the North Dakota
State Water Commission in Bismarck.
The experience of Standing Rock, which lost more than
55,000 acres of land when the Army Corps created the Lake Oahe
reservoir in the late 1950s, shows the evolution. Phyllis Young,
then 10 years old, said she lost her home to the Oahe Dam, just
north of Pierre, South Dakota, even as the government promised
to create a bustling barge industry further downriver. Federal
compensation inadequate for relocation costs led to litigation
that continues to this day.
Tribal Suspicions
As a legacy, the tribe is very suspicious of government
water engineering, said Young, a member of the tribal council.
“I know what it is to be homeless,” she said. “This is not
going to happen again.”
Government consideration of the Sioux, and river
priorities, have changed since then. During a drought on the
Northern Plains from 2000-2007, levels behind the Oahe Dam fell
too low for the tribe to have access to fresh water, closing its
hospital. That possibility was one of the “likely negative
effects” cited by the Army last week for not releasing more of
the Missouri’s water.
Longtime Stakeholders
Longtime stakeholders aren’t pleased with the direction of
river management. Martin Hettel, senior manager of bulk sales
for AEP River Operations LLC of Chesterfield, Missouri, said
that, with the Army Corps coming out against additional water
from the Missouri, shippers must now “continue to pray for
rain.”
Ken Hartman, a farmer from Waterloo, Mississippi, who
relies on the river to ship his corn and soybeans to markets,
said regulators should remember what he said is the core purpose
of waterway engineering: commerce.
“It seems like they don’t care about transportation, they
care about every other use,” said Hartman. Holding Missouri
River water back “is going to be detrimental for the whole
economy,” he said.
The Army Corps’ decision shows “more of an adaptation
model” in management, Schneiders said, one that takes into
account different uses as well as the health of the river. It’s
“the right thing to do,” he said.
Young, the tribal counselor from Standing Rock, doesn’t
think any of the approaches will be successful.
“When you drop water on the ground, it doesn’t stay there,
it goes in all different directions,” she said. “Water can’t
be controlled.”
To contact the reporter on this story:
Alan Bjerga in Washington at
abjerga@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Jon Morgan at
jmorgan97@bloomberg.net
