By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Missouri River floodwaters are receding slowly from the small southwest Iowa town of Hamburg and a former mayor doesn’t expect everyone to return.
Terry Holliman owns the NAPA Auto Store, flooded when the Missouri River broke through the Hamburg levee March 18th and inundated about two-thirds of the city.
“It’s a big financial loss for most people that can least afford it,” Holliman tells St. Joseph Post.
Holliman says the poorest residents took the brunt of this flood.
“The lower areas are the lower income families, the ones that can least afford a loss,” Holliman says, surveying the damage, adding, “It’s going to be hard on everybody.”
Levees held in the past, keeping the flooded Missouri River at bay.
Not this year.
Holliman estimates the floodwaters rose to a crest two feet higher than in 2011. The levee couldn’t hold back the flood. It breached around three in the morning March 18th, prompting officials to go door-to-door, knocking on doors, ordering people to leave their homes. At best, residents had eight hours to evacuate, according to Holliman.
Holliman says while the long recovery process is underway, not everyone who called Hamburg home plans to pick up where they were before the levee breached.
“So, we have a lot of recovery, a lot of rebuild (ahead). A lot of people will simply not come back to town, because of the loss of homes,” Holliman says. “We’ll probably lose, easily, 200 people I would say.”
Hamburg is a city with a population of slightly more than one thousand.
As for the attitude toward the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Holliman says Hamburg residents have believed for some time the Corps has failed to manage the Missouri to prevent flooding.
“The dams and the levees were built in the 50s for flood protection. They’ve now switched that. They no longer are about flood protection, they’re about environmental and recreational,” according to Holliman. “They sat there during the winter with their dams full, knowing they’re going to have runoff from snowmelt and no place to put it, except down the river.”
Congressional members have made the same complaint. Corps officials in Omaha and Kansas City say the management of the Missouri River system with its six upstream dams has changed a bit since widespread flooding, notably the devastating 1993 flood. Still, some in Congress complain the Corps doesn’t prioritize flood prevention highly enough.
