From unpaved Swain Slough Road, past scrubby bottomlands and two lonely oak trees, the mound of grass-covered earth stretches beyond the tree line as far as the eye can see. Stacks of white canvas sandbags and mounds of dirty sand line the crest of the giant berm, holding back the rushing waters beyond.
Not visible from the base of the levee, the Mississippi River is only a few feet away, mud-green and roiling as it slices a meandering border between Illinois and Missouri. The levee is the only obstacle preventing the water from pouring into the farms and fields of Pike County, Ill., a sprawling expanse of no-stoplight towns and rolling hills southeast of Quincy at the western edge of the state.
On this serene spring evening, quiet except for the whistling red-winged blackbirds, bellowing frogs and distant purr of ATVs beyond McCraney Creek, it’s hard to imagine this is the epicenter of an emotional clash dividing neighbors and states on both sides of America’s most famous river.
The pitched battle over the patchwork of human-made levees designed to control the river has led one environmental group, American Rivers, to name a section of the river, from Muscatine, Iowa, to Hamburg, Ill., about 75 miles northwest of St. Louis, one of America’s 10 “most endangered rivers.”
“This river is very important to the United States of America, and they’re treating it like it’s not,” said Nancy Guyton, who owns land in Missouri, across the river and downstream from the levee. “This river is being abused.”
The remnants of this spring’s massive flooding remain on Guyton’s farm field near tiny Annada, Mo. Guyton and her husband normally grow corn and soybeans there, but the field is submerged in a sheet of murky water that laps up to the railroad tracks at the border of town. At the water’s edge, a blanket of washed-up corn husks, corn cobs, splintered tree limbs and stumps litter the landscape.
The scene is quite different behind the levee a dozen miles to the north on the Illinois side of the river. Tractors belch smoke as they pull giant plows across the land. Field after field is planted with neat rows of crops, tiny tufts of green poking up through the rich soil.
Levees like the one owned and maintained by the Sny Island Levee Drainage District, a taxing body created after the Civil War, are at the center of an ongoing debate over flood control, river management, environmental philosophy and the basic concept of whether humans can, and should, try to control nature.
“The water’s gotta go somewhere,” said Robert Criss, a professor of earth and planetary science at Washington University in St. Louis who studies Mississippi River water levels and flooding. “We’re trying to choke off the river. It’s like clogging up your arteries with a bunch of cholesterol.”
Water wars
The way American Rivers frames the issue, a series of “illegal” levees along both sides of the river in three states, Illinois, Iowa and Missouri, is threatening more than 170,000 acres of flood plain and farmland, increasing the flood risk for farmers, small towns and cities along the banks, inundating riverside habitats and changing the flow of the river.
The environmental group’s main gripe is that levees are being built too high — “raised” is the term used — without the required permits and approvals. Combined with other man-made navigation structures, such as wing dikes, dams and locks, the infrastructure, even if made of sand and earth, is changing the character of the river and the surrounding habitat, said Eileen Shader of American Rivers.
But many of the levee districts, the agencies in control of many of the earthen berms up and down the river, say they are not only operating in good faith and within the law, but operating to protect the farms, towns, houses and roadways that dot the landscape along the Mississippi. And those on the Illinois side are skeptical about the bellyaching from their counterparts across the river, questioning why they are being blamed for natural disasters caused by heavier recent rainfall and a pulsing river.
Mike Reed, the superintendent of the Sny Island levee district, said “flood control works,” and he simply disagrees that levees are making matters worse along the river. The Sny Island levee, Reed said, protects interstates 72 and 172 near Quincy, the highway bridges from Illinois into Hannibal and the town of Louisiana in Missouri, two cross-country railroad lines and several towns, in addition to farmland. Since the record flood of 1993, he said, the district has only raised its levees in a way that would affect the water level downstream in Missouri one other time, in 2008, and that action was by the books because of emergency declarations.
“Any improvement done to the system is done within the rules and regulations at the time,” Reed said. “Some people, especially those to the south, are trying to say that our levees are raising the flood levels on them. That’s just not true. It’s inaccurate.”
Amy Larson, president of the National Waterways Conference, a group that works on issues including river commerce, ports, power plants, safety and infrastructure, said levees can be part of an effective overall plan that balances the myriad interests along the river.
“This long, extended season of flooding along the Mississippi is a stark reminder that we need to make thoughtful decisions about our infrastructure to ensure the safety of those who live along the river,” Larson said. “A myopic, one-size-fits-all approach will not allow us to reach that goal.”
The tussle involves complicated federal regulations and an array of federal, state and local agencies charged with balancing the welfare of local residents, vast swaths of farmland, ship traffic and commerce on the river, and environmental issues. American Rivers says the Federal Emergency Management Agency needs to do more to enforce legal levee heights. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has withdrawn access to money certain levee districts used for repairs, but it does not have the authority to address levee certifications.
More frequent flooding
All of this is happening against the backdrop of more frequent flooding. Between 1861 and 1943, Criss said, the river near St. Louis topped 38 feet only once. Since 2013, it topped 40 feet four times. Flooding like that experienced in the Midwest this spring is occurring with increased regularity, and scientists say the frequency of heavy rains is skyrocketing. After a reprieve over the past two weeks, more rain is in the forecast in the next few days, reigniting concerns that the river may once again test the limits of the levees and the river valley towns from the Quad Cities to St. Louis.
A March report by a team of Midwestern researchers suggests extreme bouts of precipitation and flooding could be the new normal in the Great Lakes region due to climate change. While the United States has seen annual precipitation climb 4 percent between 1901 and 2015, Great Lakes states have experienced a 10 percent rise over this same period.
Criss, in a 2016 research paper, wrote that “flooding in the Mississippi basin has become increasingly uncertain, and a succession of progressively higher, peak annual water levels is observed at many sites.”
The levees, Criss suggests, if they are going to exist at all, need to be moved farther inland to help free up natural flood plains and provide relief to a river that has too many channels and bottlenecks.
“We’ve messed with the river too much,” Criss said. “The levees are too high and too close.”
Landowners like Guyton, a vocal member of Neighbors of the Mississippi, a group pushing for equitable flood control measures, are in the middle of this tussle. Guyton said about one-third of her 3,000 acres have been flooded this year, and she blames the levees upstream. Without the levees blocking the floodwaters, at least some of the Mississippi River would have spilled into bottomlands and flood plains across eastern Iowa and western Illinois instead of being funneled downstream onto her land and that of her neighbors.
South of Guyton’s farm, access road to Clarence Cannon National Wildlife Refuge is impassable. Several blocks of downtown Louisiana, Mo., remained underwater earlier in the week. High water signs blocked Missouri Route 79 between Annada and Clarksville, forcing motorists to detour into the rolling hills and patchwork of roads to the west.
“No one’s following the rules, and no one’s making them follow the rules,” said Guyton, who has clashed with levee district officials as well as state and federal representatives up and down the Mississippi River.
Matt Jones, a farmer, seed dealer and crop insurance agent in Elsberry, Mo., and secretary of the Elsberry Drainage District, said the actions of other levee districts that raise levees during floods and do not return them to their required levels are unfairly punishing other communities, especially those on the Missouri side of the river. Flooded farmland, Jones said, is decimating crop yields and sapping farmers’ livelihood.
“How’d you like to go a year without getting paid?” Jones said, pointing to the floodwaters visible through a break in the trees. “We can’t plant until next spring now. That hurts.”
Jones says his levee district plays by the rules because it’s the neighborly way to operate.
“When others raise their levees and we can’t, where’s the water supposed to go?” Jones said. “It’s pretty basic physics from there.”
Jones said he doesn’t believe in climate change but rather believes more development and concrete in roads and towns along the river leads to increased and faster runoff toward the river, leading to a swollen river.
“This is not abstract,” he said. “The water has to go someplace.”
There are an estimated 1,926 miles of levees across all of Missouri, according to a state hazard mitigation report, primarily built to protect agricultural land, but not up to design standards to protect people and property. In fact, five levees in Pike County, Mo., have “unacceptable” ratings, after inspections in 2016. In April, representatives with the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance, a group focused on flood plain development in the St. Louis region, wrote to members of Congress and Missouri, Illinois and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials to express concern about the levee situation along the Mississippi.
“Calls to address the flood disaster by rebuilding levees even higher than they were previously and adding new levees to our overly channelized river system,” they wrote, “are counterproductive and must be resisted.”
‘A very ugly problem’
The Sny Island Levee Drainage District was organized in 1880 to “provide for the construction, reparation and protection of the drains, ditches and levees across the lands of others for agricultural, sanitary and mining purposes.” The district includes land in Pike, Adams and Calhoun counties in western Illinois, stretching about 60 miles from north to south and 3 to 7 miles across. After the creation of the district, a 54-mile-long levee was constructed “for the purpose of preventing the overflow waters of the Mississippi River from spreading out over the lands of the District,” according to a recent court filing.
Since then, the district has embarked on a series of construction projects, including two new pump stations and a 3.9-mile levee berm on the north end of the levee, near a section that breached in the 1993 flood. In its 2017 court filing for the authority to levy an additional assessment on taxpayers, the commissioners of the district detail how recent heavy rain events, in 2015 and 2017, left tens of thousands of acres of farmland underwater, damaging near-mature crops. The district’s aging pumps, Reed said, could not keep up with the water levels and were wasting diesel fuel because of their inefficiency.
“Is this (the heavy rains) just going to be the new normal? I would not say it’s a fluke because we’ve been seeing this the last several years,” Reed said. “But what will it be like in 50 years? I don’t know.”
But eliminating levees, Reed said, doesn’t make sense, especially when they are protecting towns and farms up and down the river.
“I disagree with that,” he said. “The big issue is the precipitation.”
The answer, Reed said, is a regional flood control plan that protects all of the upper Mississippi River valley.
The “war of the levees,” as Criss calls it, is not new. In fact, the debate over levees and whether or how they should be used to tame the Mississippi dates back to 1852, when engineer Charles Ellet was commissioned to prepare a report for Congress on the issue, cautioning that progressive levee construction would make flooding worse within the river valley.
As more levees have been built along the river and more frequent heavy rains pound the Upper Midwest and the central part of the country, Criss said, the situation has worsened.
“This is a continuing narrative, and the severity of ignoring the prophecies made long ago is having a heavier and heavier price every year,” Criss said. “And it’s become particularly heavy these last five years.”
More levees, more wing dams, more rain and more snowmelt equals a torrent of water making its way from Minnesota southward to Illinois and beyond. With natural flood plains blocked, the water is funneled farther south, spilling out where it finds openings — often in the unprotected territory or where the levees have not been raised as high as the other side.
“It’s become,” Criss said, “a very ugly problem.”
poconnell@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @pmocwriter
