The Army Corps of engineers are expecting today’s releases at Gavins Point to be the Maximum release amount for the summer.
The Corps announced earlier this week they would increase releases to 160,000 cubic feet per second at Gavins Point today. Click play below to listen to the KFEQ Journal report.
[audio:http://www.stjosephpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/0623-Journal.mp3|titles=0623 Journal]While maps are being prepared for releases of 200,000 cubic feet per second, they don’t expect to go any higher, Gavins Point Operations Manager Dave Becker said.
“You know, we really don’t,” Becker said. “Our projection is based the water that’s already on the ground as well as a wetter than normal weather forecast, and at this point in time based on the water on the ground and the forecast that is our projected peak at Gavins Point.”
According to Corps of Engineers data, that release will be about 1,000 cubic feet per second higher than the in-flow at the reservoir at Gavins Point. Still, the reservoir is at a good level, considering all the water moving through, Becker said.
“Yeah, we’re not at a point of water level at the lake where we need to go to increased surveillance but we are monitoring it anyways. Everything related to the dam is getting monitored more regularly.”
The dam, structurally, is in good shape, Becker said. And it’s nowhere near the maximum amount it can release. Becker says at Gavins Point, if needed, they could release up to 584,000 cubic feet per second. The dam was built with that capability based off of the numbers from the 1952 flood.
Meanwhile, this year, concern started in January when Corps officials noticed larger than normal snow packs and started developing a plan for the Missouri River Basin.
“So they had a real good plan for handling that snow melt. But then these extreme rains in the upper great-plains happened in May,” Becker said. “In northern Wyoming, eastern Montana and the Western Dakotas, that contributed 300 to 600 percent of normal rainfall in the month of May and that really took us to the point where increases needed to be made in the releases to accommodate that water.”
To put the 160,000 cubic feet per second release in perspective, that’s enough water being released per second from Gavins Point to supply nine average homes for a year. That’s a lot of power flowing through Gavins Point, Becker said.
“That’s why we have a hydroelectric power plant,” Becker said. “Then the water that comes through the spillway and runs into 54 energy dissipaters, which are concrete columns, which are used to slow down that water so it doesn’t have the erosive power downstream,” Becker said.
As many have asked for, Becker says there will likely be several reviews of how the corps handled this year’s flood once the flooding is over.
“There’s been public comment to the same, that they believe this flood event deserves a total review,” Becker said. “So it will get a total review, internally from the corps and probably externally as well, and I’m sure there will be lessons learned and things, you know, perhaps people want to do differently.”