The Army Corps of Engineers: New Channels?
By Mary Losure
April 10, 1997

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After the flooding that devastated the Midwest in 1993, the Army Corps of Engineers was forced to take a hard look at its flood control methods. A national panel of experts recommended basic changes in how the corps does business. Four years later, those changes have been slow in coming, but this year's flooding should give new impetus to the push for a new direction. Minnesota Public Radio's Mary Losure reports.

THE GREAT MIDWEST FLOOD OF 1993 took 38 lives, damaged 100,000 homes, and caused more than 12 billion dollars worth of property damage. All that spring, summer and fall, people across the nation saw the destruction on their television screens, and many began to wonder whether the government's long standing approach to flood control was really working. The Clinton administration convened a panel of experts to look at the issue. In the Galloway report, issued a year after the flooding, the experts said the corps should make a drastic shift in its priorities: it should abandon its traditional preference for dams and levees, and give much more consideration to alternatives, such as moving people and structures out of the flood plains in the first place.

Bob Post, chief of Engineering for the St. Paul district of the Army Corps of Engineers, says, since then, the corps has made some changes.

ON MANY OF THE PROJECTS WE ARE INVOLVED IN WE CAN START OUT WITH A COMMUNITY AND LOOK AT ALL SORTS OF ALTERNATIVES, NOT JUST PROJECTS THAT END UP CONSTRUCTING LEVEES AND RESERVOIRS AND CHANNELS.

Post says the corps now considers the possibility of restoring wetlands, for example, when designing flood control projects. Wetlands can reduce flooding by soaking up rainwater that otherwise would flood rivers and streams. Congress has also authorized the corps to work with local community's measures such as encouraging farmers in critical watersheds to plant cover crops so that farm fields can retain more water.

And Post says the idea of moving people out of highly flood-prone areas is slowly catching on. Ten thousand homes were relocated after the 1993 floods, mostly in Illinois, Iowa and Missouri, and Post says the same thing may happen in hard-hit areas this time around.

I THINK FOLLOWING THIS FLOOD HERE, MANY COMMUNITIES WILL SEEK FEDERAL ASSISTANCE (. . . .) DON'T WANT TO UNDERGO THIS KIND OF DISRUPTION.

Any changes the Army Corps of Engineers makes in its approach to flood control will take years to take effect, since corps projects are planned, designed and funded years before they are constructed. The flood control projects the corps is now designing for Grand Forks and Crookston grew out of a bill passed by Congress more than a decade ago.

One way of telling whether the agency's future projects will reflect any new thinking is to look at the guidelines the corps uses to plan projects. The Galloway report found the corps guidelines heavily weighted in favor of the traditional dam and levee approach to flood control, and recommended changing the guidelines, but critics point out the agency hasn't done so.

Scott Faber, director of flood plain programs for the group American Rivers, says another indication that it's business as usual with the corps is the kinds of projects that are now being funded.

WHEN YOU LOOK AT THEIR APPROPRIATIONS, NO MONEY IS BEING APPROPRIATED FOR RELOCATION, ONLY DAMS AND LEVEES (. . . . ) REFLECTS THE CORPS' DESIRE TO CONTINUE TO BUILD THOSE PROJECTS.

Faber and other critics don't want the corps to stop building dams and levees, they just say such structures should be only one part of an overall strategy. There are a few signs that the corps is slowly moving in that direction. A handful of smaller flood-control projects in Minnesota and Wisconsin include moving portions of communities out of the flood-plain. In the Redwood River basin near Marshall, the corps is studying the effect that taking some farmland out of production would have on future flooding there.

The Army Corps of Engineers reports it has spent more than $8,000,000 so far in emergency operations to fight flooding along the Red River of the North, the Minnesota River, and the Mississippi River. The Saint Paul district of the corps has distributed nearly three million sandbags in Minnesota and North Dakota, and built levees and provided technical support in 27 locations in the two states.

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