Stories from the Floodplain: An Engineering Paradigm
Throughout history, humans have made efforts to control nature. We’ve built structures to keep rivers at bay and farmland and towns dry. But these structures have proven themselves to be far from perfect, and attempting to engineer America’s largest river has only made for worse flooding events.
On this episode of Stories from the Floodplain, PRN staff member and host Ryan Grosso speaks with Army Corps engineers to discuss how we can return natural function to rivers and their floodplains while adapting to climate change and exacerbated flooding.
Supplement Audio:
CBS News
KCTV News
KHQ TV
MSNBC
PBS Newshour
Music:
Purple Planet Music (https://www.purple-planet.com)
“Cylinder Three” by Chris Zabriskie (Licensed under an Attribution License)
Emotional Ambient – bdProductions
When the Levee Breaks – Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie
Transcript
[MUSIC START]
CBS NEWS: And now flood warnings are in effect this morning for areas along nearly the entire Mississippi River as heavy rain continues to hit the Mississippi Valley. Jaricka Duncan is in Davenport, Iowa, where a temporary levee failed sending a wall of water in downtown streets. Jaricka, good morning…
KCTV NEWS: A small Missouri town has a very big problem tonight. The levee broke in Levasy, Missouri, and the rushing water took over. KCTV 5’s Caroline Sweeney talked with people waiting to go home.
KHQ TV: Well a levee failure on the Mississippi River has caused a flash flood warning to be put into place for central St. Charles County in Missouri. Get a look here at this video. This is the incident that we’re talking about. You can see here the Elm Point Levee in St. Charles, Missouri, has been breached and water is just rushing right through it.
MSNBC: Emergency officials are going door to door asking people to evacuate after a levee along the Arkansas River breached yesterday. Here you can see the water rushing through the site of the breach in Dardanelle. There are flash flood warnings across the western side of the state right now and it’s just the latest blow after a week long stretch of severe weather. NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez joins me now at the site of that levee breach. Gabe?…
[MUSIC FADE]
RYAN GROSSO: Those clips are all from 2019, and they show how some levees aren’t perfect, especially in the event of a severe flood. The fact is, we’ve spent decades building up flood infrastructure along the Mississippi, creating a false sense of security and a restricted river.
JONATHAN REMO: [laughter] So it’s kind of a history of things, so…
RYAN GROSSO: That’s Jonathan Remo, an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Resources at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.
JONATHAN REMO: Back, you know, back in the late nineteenth century into the turn of the twentieth and at least through the mid to late half of the twentieth century, there’s been kind of an engineering paradigm where we could control nature. And probably, um, we started realizing that we couldn’t control nature. In this case, nature being rivers and their floodplains and flooding, through engineering means, right? So the goal was to make the Mississippi navigable and then protect the agricultural lands from flooding.
RYAN GROSSO: 167 years ago, an Army Corps engineer warned his superiors of the pitfalls of levees along the Mississippi River. Quote, “[water] is becoming more and more confined to the immediate channel of the river, and is, therefore, compelled to rise higher and flow faster…”
Scientists and engineers have noticed this fact today. Some of our greatest floods have come within the last few decades. 1973… 1993… 2008… and 2019, where the water on the Mississippi has crested close to levels we saw 26 years ago. After these events, we’ve simply decided to build more vulnerable flood infrastructure, but in a changing world, we may need to come up with other solutions.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment acknowledges that flooding will only get worse in the Midwest. Climate change will increase the amount of precipitation and the likelihood of heavy rain events.
[MUSIC: Cylinders]
But we don’t need to wait to see these changes already happening. According to the Army Corps of Engineers, 2019 is the first time in recorded history that the entire Mississippi River basin reached flood stage.
So what should our response to this crisis be? Instead of repairing breached or overtopped levees over and over again, or building them higher, how can we alleviate some of the risk posed to people and the environment along the Mississippi River? One answer is levee setbacks.
[MUSIC FADE]
RYAN GROSSO: Let’s review what a levee is in the first place.
RANDY BEHM: And levees can be in the form of an earthen berm that are designed to a certain standard or they could be a concrete floodwall. Generally, those are placed somewhere between the river bank and back away from the bank just a little bit depending on the typical flows of the river.
RYAN GROSSO: That’s Randall Behm, a retired floodplain manager with the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
He’s worked on implementing levee setbacks in several cases along the Missouri River. The projects followed a devastating flood in 2011, where multiple levees were breached and thousands of acres of land were inundated with water.
A similar project happened on a bigger scale in the Netherlands.
PBS NEWSHOUR: [Narrator] In the mid-1990s, Dutch rivers flooded in dramatic fashion. For Dutch water engineers, it was an epiphany.
[Engineer] Maybe the strategy which we followed for many centuries to heighten dikes, maybe it’s not always the most wise strategy.
[Narrator] The Dutch government launched a program called Room for the River. They identified thirty of the most flood prone locations in the country and asked property owners to leave so they could move the dikes inland. Now, when flood waters come, they flow onto empty land without inundating homes and businesses.
RYAN GROSSO: That name, Room for the River, is a perfect representation of what the solution could be. To get a better idea of the possibilities, I spoke with Randy, who you heard from before, as well as Chuck Theiling.
CHUCK THEILING: [laughter] I’ve had a fish since I was five years old and have been interested in aquatic systems for a long time.
RYAN GROSSO: He’s a research ecologist who also works for the Army Corps of Engineers. He gave a great analogy of what setting back a levee could look like…
CHUCK THEILING: How do you change a fixed system, a constructed system that’s already there. How do you work to change that. One of the mechanisms we found is levee setbacks. And a levee setback is, what I’ve come to think of, adding an extra lane to a highway.
You would be moving the levee back away from the bank of the river into the middle of the farm field or the city; probably a farm field; unlikely to do it in a city; to give the water more room to spread out.
RYAN GROSSO: When the river is less constricted, there’s more room for it to flow and flood into its adjacent floodplain. It reduces the risk to people up and down the river. As Randy points out, it’s important to take a systematic approach to setting back levees along any river.
RANDY BEHM: Just don’t throw a hand grenade at the problem and say set back all levees because all levees are bad. That’s not the case. Levees are good. They’ve been designed to very high standards. Let’s go in and take a detailed approach looking at each levee system individually and look at what we can do.
RYAN GROSSO: It’s evident that we have to be strategic when considering the best places to set back levees. The benefits go beyond flood reduction, though. The Army Corps released a document detailing those benefits, one that Chuck Theiling was a part of.
It discusses better flood risk management and more room for the river to move into its adjacent floodplain. But with more room for a river comes additional benefits for the health of the water and the habitat that surrounds it.
Here’s a quote from the document: “There are direct ecological benefits like improved animal migrations and nutrient and sediment transportation.”
And Randy discussed the same thing with me…
RANDY BEHM: So if you go back to the 1940s and forward to the placement of these levees, we cut off a lot of habitat and so forth. So if there is a benefit to the environment, we’re reconnecting the original historic floodplain and that habitat that was associated with that by some of these levee setbacks which means we can see maybe the establishment of flora and fauna that we haven’t seen in this region in a long time.
RYAN GROSSO: Floodplains are essential to the health of surrounding habitat for many species in Illinois, but by the 1980s, the state had lost 85% of its wetlands. Restoring them and reconnecting a river with its surrounding land can bring back that vital habitat.
With the idea of changes to levees that have been in place for decades, there will always be challenges to implementation. And that official document from the Army Corps points that out too.
For one, a levee setback project doesn’t always meet the Corps’ strict requirement of a large benefit to cost ratio. It’s costly to reconstruct a levee further back from where it was originally, and the repair-in-place method, where the Corps simply comes in and fixes the breach, is typically less costly.
But these factors could be mitigated by the idea that levee setbacks for vulnerable and often-damaged levees will save money in the long run. The resiliency of a levee set further back from the bank of the river means it will be degraded by less water, and the Corps won’t have to come in to repeatedly repair it.
Like I said before, changing the way we manage flooding and our rivers after decades of the same strategies will always come with challenges. But people along our rivers could be the driving force for change.
RANDY BEHM: I was at a meeting in Des Moine with a work group that was established by state agencies out of Des Moine, Iowa. And a landowner came busting into that meeting and he was from southwest Iowa. And he said his family has been farming land there for over a hundred years starting with his grandfather then his father, him, and then he has a son that’s farming it now.
He says every time there were these massive flood events, it just destroyed all their productivity as farmers for years. And this has been a very fertile land that we’re talking about over here in southwest Iowa. But he asked, why can’t we consider something different? You engineers, have you ever considered doing something different with these levees? Maybe moving them back from the river.
[MUSIC START]
RYAN GROSSO: Where levees repeatedly fail, people and their livelihoods are altered. They grow tired of the constant battles, and it’s people like the farmer Randy mentioned who could be a voice for how we live with our rivers, instead of fighting against them.
[MUSIC FADE]
RYAN GROSSO: I asked Chuck what he thinks needs to be done in order to make levee setbacks more viable and to really change how we interact with rivers.
CHUCK THEILING: What happens is we lose the incentive to think about these things when it’s happening until it happens again. So the policies need to be changed now while it’s all fresh on people’s mind. And we need to step away from the all-or-none approach where it’s all a flood district or it’s all a wildlife refuge or it’s all one thing or another.
We have to allow wildlife refuges to flood and we have to allow farm fields to protect cities occasionally. We can put more nature into the farm fields depending on how we do this. It’s problem identification and awareness.
Every time we’ve come to the disaster it’s been respond to the PL84-99 which says rebuild it as it was. That’s by far the thing that needs to be changed. We need to allow people to rebuild levees with emergency funds in a different design if that makes sense. Not always putting it back to the status quo is the right answer.
[MUSIC: Emotional Ambient]
RYAN GROSSO: The Upper Mississippi River is in dire need of a comprehensive study, one that shows the most vulnerable places during a flood. One that helps us adapt to this new “normal.” Due to climate change, the river could flood like this for years to come, so it’s more important than ever to consider innovative ways to protect people and the environment along the Mississippi.
RANDY BEHM: You engineers, have you ever considered doing something different with these levees?
[MUSIC FADE]
[MUSIC: When the Levee Breaks]
RYAN GROSSO: I’ve been your host Ryan Grosso, with Prairie Rivers Network. We protect water, heal land, and inspire change. To learn more about the work we do or become a member, visit prairierivers.org.
And be sure to listen to our other episode, telling the stories of people affected by unauthorized levees along the Mississippi River.
Thanks for listening, see you soon.
[MUSIC STOP]
Stories from the Floodplain: That Lawless Stream
Mark Twain once wrote, “ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it.” These words are immortalized in his book Life on the Mississippi, and it’s no argument the prolific author had a close relationship to the Mississippi River. But in a way, his warning has been lost with time. The Mississippi River is more constricted than ever by levees and flood protection measures.
In some areas, agriculture and levee districts have raised their levees beyond authorized heights. If there is a severe flood, their land would stay dry while other places across the river, upstream, or downstream could experience up to 1.5 feet of extra water. This is an equity issue, one that must be told through the people affected by unlawful levees from their neighbors.
On this episode of Stories from the Floodplain, join PRN staff member and host Ryan Grosso as he journeys to Hannibal, Missouri, to hear from people who are fearful of an age of “levee wars.”
Supplement Audio:
The Valley of the Giant – U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Life on the Mississippi – John Greenman, Librivox
Music:
Mississippi River Blues – Tommy Duncan and his Western All-Stars
Purple Planet Music (www.purple-planet.com)
“Bumbler” by Andy G. Cohen (Released under a Creative Commons Attribution International License)
Clocks – Adigold
When the Levee Breaks – Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie
Transcript
RYAN GROSSO: I’m going to play you a clip from a video made in the 1940s. It’s called, The Valley of the Giant.
ARMY CORPS ARCHIVE: Take a valley, broad and gentle. Stretch it from the highlands to the sea. Cover in grass, dense forests, lush fields, and great pastures. Cloak it with natural beauty. Build cities and towns along the wooded slopes, and you have the Valley of the Mississippi… the greatest in the world!
RYAN GROSSO: This documentary was made by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. That’s the government institution responsible for overseeing navigation and flood protection projects along the nation’s rivers.
What really struck me about this video was that introduction… the way the narrator describes the Mississippi. You start with a valley… you sprinkle vast woodland and great pastures around it… stretching it from the highlands, all the way to the sea. It’s a beautiful way to describe the third largest watershed in the world.
But, that’s not the primary purpose of this old film. Most of the 27 minutes describes the danger of the Mississippi. The Great Flood of 1927…
ARMY CORPS ARCHIVE: But sometimes, the giant gets out of control. Sometimes, the rich valley lies helpless, defenseless against great floods which leave terror and destruction in their wake.
RYAN GROSSO: And how miles of levees will protect, without fail, the people and property that have found a home along the river’s banks.
ARMY CORPS ARCHIVE: And so, the master plan goes forward. In the Spring and Fall, when the giant river awakes to begin its headlong rush to the sea, these massive walls will stand as a bullwhack to protect the valley. Agriculture will flourish unharmed and the people of the valley will prosper. Cities, formerly ravaged by flood, will grow stronger under the protection of the great levees.
RYAN GROSSO: Despite these long-ago promises, flooding is getting worse. In 2019, we’ve seen almost record water levels in some places. Farms are flooded, people have been dealing with flood water for weeks and months at a time.
Even more, some levee and agricultural districts have all but weaponized their levees, making them taller. All to protect themselves from rising waters with no approval from the Army Corps of Engineers or other agencies. In the event of a severe flood, they risk pushing up to a foot and a half of water onto their neighbors across the river, upstream or downstream.
I decided I needed to see these levees for myself, and talk to people whose livelihoods could be altered by someone else’s actions.
[MUSIC: Mississippi River Blues]
RYAN GROSSO: It didn’t take long to decide on the perfect place to visit along the river. Hannibal, Missouri. It’s 100 miles northwest of St. Louis, about 17,000 people live there, and it sits just across the river from the Sny Levee Drainage District in Illinois. That’s one of the districts that has levees 2 to 3 feet taller than what they’re allowed to have.
If there’s one thing you should know about Hannibal, it’s that it’s the boyhood home of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or… as most people know him, Mark Twain. One of America’s most famous authors. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer… The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn… The Prince and the Pauper, just to name a few.
Admittedly, the river, and Hannibal, are very different today than they were during Twain’s lifetime. But the threat of flooding remains, and has even gotten worse.
[MUSIC STOP]
My first experience in Hannibal was meeting Nancy Guyton, a woman who’s been fighting against these raised levees for almost 10 years. As she puts it, it’s a full-time job with no pay.
She no longer lives in Hannibal, but she grew up there, and helps care for farmland with her husband in Annada, Missouri, about an hour downstream from Hannibal.
There wasn’t much time for small-talk after our cordial meeting. She was my guide for the levees just across the river, the ones maintained and illegally raised by the Sny Levee Drainage District. Just so I don’t have to say that every time, I’ll refer to the district as The Sny from here on out.
She drove me out of downtown Hannibal, onto Highway 72, and across the river to Illinois. A highway exit and a few two-lane roads later, we reached a sharp turn onto a gravel road, just off of the entrance to a grain elevator.
NANCY GUYTON: Here we go… Look up there… Here it starts…
RYAN GROSSO: That’s the start of the…
NANCY GUYTON: That is the freeboard they’re putting on the levees. On their already-to-high levees. See how obvious it is? And it gets worse…
RYAN GROSSO: That’s us, driving on this gravel road situated right next to a levee that makes up the northernmost part of the Sny. We’re reacting to how massive these levees are, both in height and width.
Dark brown sand piled in a neat formation. From our viewpoint, the sand sloped gradually upward to the very top, but there was no plant life growing on it. The levee looked well-manicured, perfect almost; it was hard to believe there was encroaching river water just on the other side. There was a thin layer of fresh sand just at the top of it, like someone had put it there recently. Beyond the levee, we could see the top half of the matured trees just on the other side, a good indication of how tall this levee really is.
NANCY GUYTON: And believe me, I’m glad to show the whole world because we don’t need money thrown at this project. We need sound reasoning.
RYAN GROSSO: Between the white sand bags piled off to the side, that fresh thin layer of sand, and the track marks of heavy machinery all over the place… it was obvious that someone had been out here recently.
That wasn’t the end of the tour, though. Nancy wanted to continue on that gravel road next to the levee, but there were pools of water from the rainfall that came earlier that day, making that portion of the path useless.
We turned around, and this process continued for another two and a half, three hours. More two-lane roads, more gravel roads, and at the end of all of them? More well-manicured levees, built up taller than what is allowed, keeping out the high water of the Mississippi River.
NANCY GUYTON: It’s… It’s a little upsetting to see people go to this degree knowing they’re harming others and their chance of a good livelihood. That is the sad part.
[MUSIC START]
RYAN GROSSO: What struck me most about this journey was what the levees were protecting. Farm land. Acres upon acres of row crops, some corn and some soybeans, already planted for the season.
I didn’t see what was happening downstream, though. I mentioned Nancy’s family owns some farmland in Annada, Missouri. When I met her on June 12th, they hadn’t planted a single crop. They don’t have the luxury of pristine and tall levees. Their land has been flooded since April; a stark contrast to the fields we saw in the Sny…
[MUSIC STOP]
RYAN GROSSO: Nancy and I parted ways after her tour of the levees and an early dinner back in downtown Hannibal. But my time in Hannibal wasn’t done yet.
HENRY SWEETS: Well this year, in 2019… [phone ringing], Whoops! We are answering the telephone… [phone ringing]
RYAN GROSSO: That’s Henry Sweets.
HENRY SWEETS: And I’m the executive director of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal, Missouri.
RYAN GROSSO: I met him the following day. You could consider him an expert on all things Hannibal and all things Mark Twain. He’s been the curator of the museum for close to 41 years, and grew up in Hannibal.
The museum sees about 50,000 guests a year, and that’s not only from people in the United States…
HENRY SWEETS: They come from literally around the world. We’ll have as many as 60, maybe 70 different countries sign our guest register in the course of a year. So that draw from Mark Twain is truly an international draw bringing people here.
RYAN GROSSO: I was curious to ask him what Twain would think if he saw the Mississippi River today. As most people know, the guy had a close relationship to the river.
HENRY SWEETS: Well, growing up here in Hannibal, Samuel Clemens, the future Mark Twain, lived about a block and a half from the banks of the river. So when that cry-a steamboat a-coming rang out, he’d be one of the first boys down at the riverfront to watch the boats come and go.
RYAN GROSSO: From being a kid playing on its banks, to a steamboat pilot sailing between St. Louis and New Orleans just before the start of the Civil War. Twain knew and understood the nature of the Mississippi River better than most during his lifetime.
He wrote about his time as a steamboat pilot in his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883. Even then, 136 years ago, he could see what people wanted to do with the river…
[MUSIC – Bumbler]
LIBRIVOX RECORDING: One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.
[MUSIC STOP]
RYAN GROSSO: Here’s Henry’s thoughts on how Twain might react if he was standing on Hannibal’s flood wall and looking out onto the Mississippi River…
HENRY SWEETS: I think he would be amazed at how much the river has been tamed to the degree of providing that avenue of commerce and transportation. I think he would be very sad to the great demise of the passenger traffic on the river because working on the steamboats, he was dealing with those passengers and crew all the time.
Today you have to take a special cruise to get out on the river. The regular transportation just isn’t there like he knew and he remembered. But I think he would find the river still very familiar to him and would still be an inspiration for him.
[MUSIC START]
RYAN GROSSO: I find that answer almost poetic, because according to Sweets, there are still aspects of America’s grandest river that would inspire Mark Twain today. Beyond this senseless and dangerous levee war is a feeling that the cultural and environmental essence of the Mississippi may still be there… enough to inspire some of the most well-known literature of all time…
[MUSIC STOP]
RYAN GROSSO: I met with Steve Ayers that same day, later in the afternoon. He’s an older gentleman with a thick gray mustache, and has been a potter for more than 40 years. He’s made and sold pottery out of the same shop, right in downtown Hannibal, since 1988.
STEVE AYERS: So I’ve been very, very lucky having been able to do this all my life.
RYAN GROSSO: Ayers remembers a time when downtown Hannibal looked very different…
STEVE AYERS: Prior to that, you could buy… people were giving buildings away… you could buy buildings for $15,000 in the downtown. Everyone was afraid of the floods. We have flooding time after time after time.
RYAN GROSSO: Their flood wall has protected them from rogue waters since the early 90s. Since then, Hannibal’s downtown businesses and tourism is able to at least to function during a high crest on the river.
When I first talked with Steve over the phone, he wasn’t too sure about the raised levees across the river in the Sny. You had people like Nancy and the Army Corps insisting the levees are too high. All while the Sny continuously denies it.
That day we met, he was much more convinced of the issue. Steve had seen how tall the levees were himself, just like I did, and he hoped to be more vocal about the illegal levees in the future.
STEVE AYERS: They’re claiming that the levee across the river is 29 feet and it’s not. It’s higher than that. So whenever we go into these conversations, the most basic question, they’re lying. And you have to let that frame everything you talk about from that point forward.
RYAN GROSSO: The following day I met with John Lyng…
JOHN LYNG: I’ve lived in Hannibal my whole life, and I am semi-retired right now.
RYAN GROSSO: He served as Hannibal’s mayor from 1981 to 1985. We met at Java Jive, a locally owned coffee shop whose front door is a few hundred feet from Hannibal’s flood wall. Having lived in Hannibal his whole life, and having been mayor for four years, John is in a good position to give an idea of how Hannibal dealt with flooding before their flood wall.
JOHN LYNG: The problem was not that any one flood did that much devastating damage to the businesses and the buildings here. It was the problem that it just happened over and over again.
People would do everything they could to protect their business from the flood. They’d move stuff to the second floor; they’d haul it out; they’d come back; they’d clean up after the flood and they’d repair. And a year, a year or two later, they’d have to do the same thing over again.
And it got to the point that it was so frustrating that it was very difficult to get people to do business in the area that was subject to fairly regular flooding.
RYAN GROSSO: I asked him what his thoughts were on the overbuilt levees across the river…
JOHN LYNG: Well I hope you’re prepared for a disappointment because I don’t know enough to know how one affects the other. When the river is constricted, it will flood more. And I think we’ve known that for a long, long time.
RYAN GROSSO: He went on to tell me that people need to follow the rules put into place, but at this point, he thinks Hannibal needs to build their flood wall higher in response.
JOHN LYNG: If that levee isn’t high enough, and obviously it is not, then the logical thing to do would be to permanently increase it, its height, by 30 inches or 36 inches or whatever would be appropriate and not have to do all that work and incur all that expense.
I’ve had trouble trying to sell that proposition.
[MUSIC START]
RYAN GROSSO: This is the kind of culture the Sny supports with their actions. In some places, people like John want to build higher if someone else across the river does the same. In other places, people are more vulnerable to flooding because they follow the rules and refuse to engage in an endless battle of raising levees.
[MUSIC STOP]
RYAN GROSSO: Then there’s Steve Terry…
STEVE TERRY: Hi, my name is Steve Terry. S-T-E-V-E T-E-R-R-Y. I’m co-owner and captain of the Mark Twain Riverboat in Hannibal, Missouri.
RYAN GROSSO: Captain Terry pilots one of the few riverboats that Mark Twain would see on the modern Mississippi River. His ability to operate is heavily dependent on the level of the water.
STEVE TERRY: Well to date, as of right now, we’ve run 22 trips. This is the middle of June. Normally we start at the end of March. So we should’ve had 122 trips in by now.
RYAN GROSSO: When the river is high, the launch point for his riverboat is inundated with water. They can’t bring people out onto the water with nowhere to get them on the boat. While the museum or Ayers’ pottery shop is protected behind Hannibal’s flood wall, Terry and the Mark Twain Riverboat Cruise can’t do much to get away from the water.
It’s instances like these where the levees across the river, in the Sny, may really be affecting Terry’s business. If more water is pushed onto Hannibal, their waterfront property will be flooded more frequently, and for longer duration.
Talking to people like Steve and Nancy gave me insight into the places affected by dangerous unlawful levees. Living a few hours east of Hannibal, I’m far removed from the Mississippi River, but I hope hearing their stories connected you to the issue, just like it did for me.
[MUSIC – Clocks]
The rules put into place by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources are meant to create an equitable environment. They’re meant to ensure people are protected at the same level, but when places like the Sny break those rules, that equitable environment is shattered.
These overbuilt levees in the Sny and other districts push risk and water onto the people you heard from. People who also have homes, property, and businesses along the river. People who do follow the rules and maintain their levees or flood walls properly. People who don’t want to get involved in an endless battle of raising levees, just because their neighbors do the same…
I’ll leave you with Nancy’s words…
NANCY GUYTON: It’s… It’s a little upsetting to see people go to this degree knowing they’re harming others and their chance of a good livelihood. That is the sad part.
[MUSIC STOP]
[MUSIC – When the Levee Breaks]
RYAN GROSSO: I’ve been your host Ryan Grosso, with Prairie Rivers Network. We protect water, heal land, and inspire change. To learn more about the work we do or become a member, visit prairierivers.org.
And be sure to listen to our other episode, detailing natural solutions to alleviate risk and flooding on the Mississippi River.
Thanks for listening, see you soon.
[MUSIC STOP]
