By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Extreme northwest Missouri continues to battle floodwaters, even as flooding on the Missouri River moves downstream.
Atchison County Emergency Management Deputy Director Mark Manchester says three levees in the county have failed and the community of Watson has been surrounded by water and cut off from the rest of the county.
Manchester is grateful for one thing: no deaths so far.
“The levees can be fixed, homes can be repaired, roads can be fixed; people’s lives can’t be replaced,” Manchester says. “And, like I said, thankfully we haven’t had any injuries or anything like that.”
Flooding began in earnest with the failure of the Spencer Dam in northern Nebraska, which sent the Niobrara River cascading south. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers increased water releases from Gavins Point Dam, upstream on the Missouri River, to relieve pressure on Nebraska. But, all that water washed over private levees downstream, sending water over Interstate 29 in southwestern Iowa, forcing the closure of I-29 at Rock Port.
It didn’t stop there.
A levee failed west of Watson, which now finds itself an island. Another levee failed two miles north of Highway 136 and a third was overtopped and collapsed between Rock Creek and Mill Creek.
Manchester says, as bad as the current situation is, he is concerned about the near future.
“A lot of levee damage out there,” Manchester says. “If this turns out to be a wet spring, summer, we get a lot of rains, and the levees haven’t had a chance to get repaired yet, then we could be looking at flooding again later in the year. We don’t know.”
As the flooding in extreme northwest Missouri grew worse, the Missouri Department of Transportation moved to closure of I-29 south, diverting northbound traffic to U.S. 71 just north of St. Joseph.
Manchester says that with the failure of private levees in Iowa and Missouri it makes it difficult to estimate when things might return to normal.
“This is such a different ballgame with the number of breaks that have occurred to our north and the number of areas that are impacted,” according to Manchester. “So, we really don’t know at this time how soon this is going to be over.”
The National Weather Service forecasts the Missouri River to crest Friday morning at just over 29 feet, which would be just below the level reached in 2011. The record crest of slightly higher than 32 feet was reached in 1993. The water level on the river is expect to drop quickly to below major flood stage by the end of the weekend.