Congressional Record, Volume 157 Issue 92 (Friday, June 24, 2011)

[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 92 (Friday, June 24, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H4568-H4571]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

MIDWEST FLOODING

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for
30 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it's my privilege and honor to address
you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I would say at
the outset that it is also my honor and privilege to have been seated
here on the floor of the House of Representatives as I listened to a
Congressman and judge, Ted Poe, address you on the brave patriots from
Texas that were on the poster and as he went down through and said
choice morsels of each individual's life and what happened in their
sacrifice and talked to us about the values that they defended and
their reasons that they have put their lives on the line.
I'm impressed by the honor that Ted Poe did to those who have given
their lives from Texas, and I'm very convinced that he would agree with
me that he'd appreciate it if that honor could be reflected across all
of the brave patriots who have given their lives in the defense of this
country in this conflict and in past conflicts. We always pray that
there be no future conflict.
Mr. Speaker, I came to the floor to address a different subject
matter. Perhaps I'll digress or cross over into the national security
side of this. But I find that I don't believe any Member of any
delegation has yet come to the floor to talk about the natural disaster
events that have been taking place in the Midwest, and in particular in
the Missouri River basin area. I'm one who has grown up in that
drainage basin area. I've lived there on that side of the great divide
for most of my life. We have some circumstances today that eclipse the
500-year flood event of 1996.
In 1996, more water came down the Missouri River than ever before. It
was the largest amount of cubic feet per second and the largest amount
of over a million acre-feet that had come down. I will say there were a
couple of events that would compete with that, depending on how you
define it, Mr. Speaker. One would be a flood in 1943 that brought the
attention of the world. We were in the middle of a world war. We didn't
get to addressing the massive runoff in the Missouri River from the
1943 flood event.
In 1952, the huge floods came again and more water for a single month
came down the Missouri River than ever before, or since. That amounted
to a discharge in million acre-feet of 13.2 million acre-feet of water
coming down in a single month, the month of April 1952.

{time} 1450

That course flooded everything and put the water higher than it had
been before, and it brought to it the attention of this Congress. The
attention of this Congress, in paying particular attention to what
happened in the flood event in '52, followed through on some plans that
had been discussed after the 1943 flood, and they began to take action
to move forward for the construction of what we now know as the Pick-
Sloan Program.
The Pick-Sloan Program is the construction of six large dams on the
Upper Missouri River. It starts at Gavins Point Dam in South Dakota,
and it goes on up to Fort Randall Dam, to Oahe, and then on up into
North Dakota where you see Garrison Dam and Fort Peck. I left out Big
Bend. So we have Gavins Point, Fort Randall, Big Bend, Oahe, Garrison
Dam, and then Fort Peck Dam. These are all built on the main stem of
the Missouri River, but they collect water from all the tributaries.
The water that we have now coming down through the Midwest comes down
out of Montana into North Dakota, where it's flooding now, and it's
flooding also across South Dakota, all

[[Page H4569]]

across the bottoms, and is spilling out of the six dams one after
another at discharge rates higher than we have seen at sustained rates
ever before. It's the most water to come down the river since these six
dams were built in this Pick-Sloan Program starting in the fifties and
finishing in the early sixties. The discharge level at Gavins Point
Dam, which is the lowest one--that's at Yankton, South Dakota--is now
approaching 160,000 cubic feet per second. That's more discharge than
we've seen before.
The result of this is we're in a flood stage all down this river in
the areas that I've mentioned. From below the dams, the Missouri River
is at a flood stage. Some of it has just not yet arrived in St. Louis
in its peak form. But because of this, it has flooded some of our
communities, and it has flooded hundreds of thousands of acres of our
farmland. It has caused us to build many miles of levees that some
would design as temporary and some would design as permanent; and some
of them, I hope, do stay permanent because, again, the water is going
to be semi-permanent.
This is not, Mr. Speaker, a short-term flood event that just happened
because the clouds opened up and it gushed down into the river and it's
going to wash by us and be gone in a few days like many floods are.
This is a long-term national disaster flood event for the entire
Missouri River basin all the way from Montana to St. Louis, Missouri.
This is the highest water level that we have seen since the Pick-Sloan
Program was built, and in some places, it's the highest water we've
ever seen. It will certainly be the longest term that we'll have been
underwater that has ever been.
So as I travel up and down the river--and I have the privilege, Mr.
Speaker, of representing all of the Missouri River that Iowa touches,
which would be from the Sioux City area where the Missouri River comes
out of South Dakota and joins up and provides the border, the western
border of Iowa, between Iowa and Nebraska. It's all Missouri River with
Nebraskans on one side and Iowans on the other side; both of us are
underwater on both sides of the river. It's also true in South Dakota.
The water that's coming down the river in this massive quantity has
brought about a lot of criticism and a lot of scrambling. First, I want
to say, Mr. Speaker, that the events that brought us to this are
unprecedented in modern recorded history in that, of all of the area
that the Pick-Sloan Program handles--all of the drainage area of the
Missouri River and the Upper Missouri River in particular--the Corps of
Engineers watches the precipitation; they watch the snowcap, and they
anticipate how much water they will have.
We have gone through at least an 8-year record drought in the Upper
Missouri River. These reservoirs--these six huge reservoirs that were
not designed for the primary purpose at all of fishing and recreation
but were designed for flood control and navigation and electrical
generation and also to cool our generators where we have coal-fired
generators along the river and for navigation--have been very valuable
to the States--to South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana--because the
tourism industry for recreation and fishing has so migrated to those
beautiful areas that they have.
When they're out of water, when the pool drains down during an 8-year
drought, which they have had, it might be three-quarters of a mile from
where your dock was, where your boat was tied up to where the water
actually is.
We've even engaged in a struggle here on the floor of the House of
Representatives about who gets the water when there is a short water
supply. Congressman Denny Rehberg has tried mightily to keep as much
water as possible up in Montana when they've needed it. I found myself
in disagreement with him, trying to get the water down the river so we
have enough to cool our generators, float our boats, bring some barge
traffic up, and provide for flood control.

So the 8-year drought is over, Mr. Speaker. It's completely over. It
was actually over the last year and a half or so. In thinking of them
as six huge bathtubs that are nearly dry; the water level in the six
huge dams has been coming up over the last year and a half or more. As
of last fall, it caught up to the designed pool elevations, and then
they had enough rain in the Upper Missouri that it overfilled these six
dams.
The Corps of Engineers, operating under the Master Manual guidelines,
which is the playbook that they have to manage these six dams by,
lowered the pool elevations in the dams so that they had storage in
order to be prepared for any future floods. They're required under the
Master Manual to manage these levels so that they have 16.3 million
acre-feet of storage capacity to manage the flood. They drew it down to
that level--to those normal pool elevations, I will call them. They did
so over the wintertime, and that was fine. It was all throughout
November, December, January, February, and early March: stability
within those pool levels and a storage capacity of 16.3 million acre-
feet. They're prepared for spring rains. They're prepared for the snow
runoff. That's manageable.
Then in very, very late March and early April, heavy snows in the
mountains began, and the snow pack began to build in the mountains--and
it couldn't have been anticipated--to 140 percent of the anticipated
volume of snow that would have to, of course, melt and come down the
Missouri River. In addition to that, they had spring rains across the
Upper Missouri basin--across the plains and the foothills of the
mountains. Those spring rains flowed down into the reservoirs and
overfilled them as well. Once it happened, it was a situation where the
storage capacity in the reservoirs was diminished significantly and
when an unusual event took place on May 22.
That's when Billings, Montana, got 8 inches of rain and when some of
the other areas got 10 and 12 inches of rain, and it was across a vast
area of the Upper Missouri basin. As that water came down into the
reservoirs, the Corps of Engineers began to watch the rain gauges and
the runoff, and concluded that they had a rare event, an event that the
Pick-Sloan Program was not designed to handle with ease.
They announced to us on that day, May 22, that they would open up the
gates of the dams so that the lowest one at Gavins Point in Yankton,
South Dakota, which is the one we watch for all the flow of the rest of
the river, would be flowing at 110,000 cubic feet per second. That was
May 22 or early May 23. By the 26th of May, the Corps of Engineers had
evaluated the flow rates in the tributaries and the rainfall reports
that they had and the forecast, and announced that they had to increase
that flow to 150,000 cubic feet per second.
That makes a tremendous difference, Mr. Speaker, because the result
of that necessary decision that the Corps of Engineers made was that
the water tables, the water levels, would go up in the river above
flood stage for what turns out to be almost the entire flow and maybe,
actually, the entire flow of the Missouri River downstream from the
dams.
Also, the flow that's coming through upstream from the dams is
flooding significant areas--residential areas, commercial property
areas, ag land in vast amounts--all the way up through the Dakotas and
Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, with some spilling over into Kansas. That's
the situation that we have.
I should say also, Mr. Speaker, that my life's work has been the
earthmoving business. We've gone in and built levees and dug ditches
and built terraces and waterways and dams. We've bid work on the flood
control work on the Missouri River; and I've watched the flows, studied
the flows, floated the river for recreational purposes and engineering
reasons. As a State senator in Iowa for 6 years and now as a Member of
Congress into my ninth year, I've dealt with the public policies that
have to do with the water coming down the river and the species that
are affected by it.
With all of this together, if I look back upon it and try to become a
Monday morning quarterback, Mr. Speaker, I'll come to this conclusion
that, yes, knowing what we know today, it would have been possible to
have prevented this long-term flooding that we have in the Missouri
River bottom--but that's knowing what we know today. The Corps of
Engineers could not have known that they were going to get the heavy
snowfalls that would come down on the mountains, which would be

[[Page H4570]]

melting. Even now, perhaps half of that snow has melted today, and the
balance of it has to still melt.

{time} 1500

They couldn't have known that until the snow actually arrived in late
March and earlier April. Neither could they have known that there would
be this huge, unseasonal rain that would run off to the extent that it
did and saturate the soil so that the big rain that hit Billings, as I
mentioned, would run off to the extent that it did.
Once they knew about the flows coming in, they made the decision that
they had to make, Mr. Speaker, and we are where we are. Now we're
watching 160,000 cubic feet per second come out of Gavins Point. That's
more than ever before. The water table is above the flood stage all the
way along the Missouri River from below Gavins Point. And I presume
that the gentleman who represents North Dakota and the gentlelady who
represents South Dakota can speak to those issues up there, and I
imagine that they can say that they have floods all the way up and down
the Missouri River bottom completely throughout the Dakotas and likely
Montana.
But, Mr. Speaker, these water levels are going to stay, and they're
going to stay for all of the rest of June, likely all the rest of July,
and partway into August, most likely. And, in fact, these water levels
could stay into September or October, depending on whether we get
unseasonably high rains. If we do, if there's additional rain to this,
then these water levels or even, on the outside, higher water levels
could be with us for a long time to come on into the fall.
The people that live in these States that I have mentioned have to
live with high water for a long period of time, not like a tornado that
comes and blows away your homes and your businesses and allows you to
go back when the sun comes out and start to clean up the mess and
rebuild. This flood is not like a tornado, not like a hurricane. It's
not even like a flood, a normal flood. A normal flood will come up and
wash over you and wash away some things and soak the rest, and the
water table will go down.
Even on the Mississippi River, where the water comes up slow and goes
down slow, this eclipses the duration of any flood that I know in that
the Corps of Engineers, without a lot of choice, by June 14 this month,
June 14, had opened up the gates to 150,000 cubic feet per second, now,
as of about today, 160,000 cubic feet per second, and that discharge,
that volume of water that floods the Missouri River bottom, I will say
completely, will continue to be with us for 2 months perhaps, perhaps
more. That's unprecedented in duration. It is unprecedented in volume.
This is more water than has ever come down the Missouri River in a year
that we know of since we've been recording these records.
I said 16.3 million acre-feet of storage capacity that they have, but
the projected flow out of the Missouri River for this year is 54
million acre-feet, and that's more than even came down in the 1993
floods, which was a 500-year flood event or at least described to be
the same. I lived under that, Mr. Speaker. It flooded four of my major
projects and changed my life, and the long story I won't tell here, but
I might not be in this Congress had it not been for the 1993 flood,
which completely redirected my life.
This flood is redirecting the lives of thousands of people up and
down the Missouri River bottom. It's changing businesses. It's changing
residences. I'm convinced, Mr. Speaker, that we will lose businesses
over the long term and we will lose people over the long term who can't
get back into their homes.
To give an example--and it's a South Dakota example of the Dakota
dunes. It is a region that was built around a golf course, the Dakota
Dunes Golf Course, just outside of Iowa, outside of the north Sioux
City side, which some might call it a suburb of Sioux City itself. But
in that area, people that had, I will say, wherewithal and vision
developed an area in there for residences, and it's a very nice area.
It's close to the river. The nicer the homes, the closer to the river
they seem to be. And when the Corps of Engineers announced on May 26
that these discharge levels would be coming down the river, they went
to work with private money and began building a temporary levee
alongside the Missouri River to protect their homes.
This is a neighborhood coming together with their checkbooks to do
emergency work to protect their homes, and while they were doing that,
the Corps of Engineers let an emergency contract to build a levee that
protects about half of the homes in that area, but it is not stable
enough for them to build that levee to protect all of the homes. And so
you have two levees: one private money, good homes protecting
themselves; another one, Corps of Engineers' money to protect the
balance of those homes. If we lose that levee near the river, about
half of the homes in the Dakota Dunes and probably the nicest homes
will be under a massive amount of water.
And as I was up there to visit, they were building this temporary
levee. And, Mr. Speaker, I've spent my life in the construction
business, specifically the earthmoving business. We've had a fair
number of our own machines running at a single time, but this operation
in that area of the Dakota Dunes, a small population area, had 170
trucks hauling dirt into these temporary levees, about 50 trucks
hauling into the Corps of Engineers' levee, 120 trucks hauling into the
private money levee that was there, most of them belly dumps and side
dumps, semi size--not little short straight trucks, but big trucks with
a full load of dirt on each one of them--building a levee as the river
comes up.
We've done that in South Dakota. We've done that on the Iowa side and
also on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River where we built several
miles of levees around our critical companies and critical
infrastructure.
CF Industries, which is the fertilizer company, built a levee about
eight-tenths of a mile long, and then all the way around their plant
put in about 14 to 16 wells with pumps in them to dewater the inside of
their levee as the river runs around the outside. That's true also with
the protein company that's there, and they have been protecting the
generating plants with sandbagging and pumps and temporary levees.
And as you go on down the river, Nebraska, Omaha, has its story.
Council Bluffs has its story. They're protected by a pretty good Corps
of Engineers' levee, but the water is high, and these levees are not
built for 2 months of high water and fast flows and turbulence up
against these levees. So they have to be monitored 24/7 all the way
through until the water goes down. And if there's a little boil,
somebody's got to be there to fix that, as happened in down in the
southwest corner of Iowa. We can lose a levee in a matter of just a
minute or two.
I know that there was a levee that ended up that almost spontaneously
had a 30-foot boil in it where the earth just a disappeared, and then a
little bit later it was 200 feet long, then it was 300 feet long. Then
it couldn't be repaired any longer, and the backup levee is what is
protecting the city of Hamburg right now.
There has been a courageous effort, Mr. Speaker, on the part of
Midwesterners to build the temporary facilities they could, and the
short notice that they had, when you think that the Thursday before
Memorial weekend is when the word came from the Corps of Engineers that
these historically high flows would be released, and it takes a couple
of days for that water to get down. Of course, they weren't going to
peak out on this until June 14, but they had maybe 2 weeks to be ready
for the highest water, and they had to get ready while the water was
coming up, sometimes a foot a day.
They've done a phenomenal job. And as I go into the emergency command
centers in places like Sioux City, Council Bluffs, Iowa, as I go into
the little town of Blencoe, Iowa, 270 people there in the flat bottom
of the Missouri River who had been told that they would see 2 to 3 feet
of water everywhere in their town and there wasn't going to be a way to
save the town, they looked around and said, What do we do? Do we let
all of our property flood and stay under water for a couple of months?
And five contractors came together and put 11 machines on the job, and
a few days later they had built 5 miles of levee. It goes all the way
around the mighty little city of

[[Page H4571]]

Blencoe and ties it back in together, and they have pumps sitting there
and they're protecting themselves from the flood. And that little
Blencoe doesn't need to be the Alamo for the flood of 2011. They can
fight this flood off, and we want to be there to help them all that we
can.
I have a business owner that builds trailers in Missouri Valley,
Iowa. He had gone in and bought a business in downtown Missouri Valley
a few years ago, and because of the floods from the nineties built a
new location above the floodplain just on the outside of the town by
the interstate, Interstate 29, which, by the way, is closed today
because of the floodwaters covering the interstate highway. Mr.
Speaker, he built a new plant above the floodplain so that he didn't
have to be flooded out again.
And about 3 years ago, there was a quirk of weather and one of the
major streams backed up and flooded his new plant, and he's one of the
top trailer salespeople in America. It flooded his new plant with about
4 or 5 feet of water and destroyed some of his property that was in
there. He picked his chin back up and went to work and cleaned up the
mess and fixed the trailers that he could fix and junked the rest and
started all over and put a smile back on his face and said, That's
life, isn't it? And went to work in a courageous, American way.

{time} 1510

Now his plant that is built above the flood stage and was flooded 2
or 3 years ago is back under--and I can't confirm today that it's under
water, but they predict it will be under 4 feet of water. And he has
moved his equipment back down to the old plant. He has moved from the
nonflood zone to the flood zone, where the old plant was, where they
predict that one won't be under water. But his new plant that's out of
the flood stage will be underwater.
The irony of all of this is not lost on him nor is it lost on me.
Sometimes whatever you do, it's just going to end up to be wrong. This
time, we have a lot of people that are suffering that maybe have done
everything that they can do to protect themselves. We have farmsteads,
Mr. Speaker, that are completely flooded, and we have hundreds of them
that are under water.
All up and down on the west side of Interstate 29 in the southwest
corner of Iowa, we've evacuated some 600 homes because they are all
going under water. In the little town of Percival and two other small
towns in that area, it has now been announced they will be underwater
and flooded. And I hesitate to report exactly where that water is now.
I am going tonight, and by the weekend, I will have looked at all that.
But the water that we have is unprecedented. It's strange in its
nature in that floodwaters we see as silty, muddy water that is full of
mud and silt and junk. Some of this is. Maybe 40 percent of this water
is silt-laden water, but more than half of it, perhaps 60 percent, Mr.
Speaker, is clear water. And when you fly over it and you look down,
you can see through that water, and you can see the striping on
Interstate 29. You can see corn stalks, corn stems, little sprouted
plants that grew up about this far before the water flooded them, and
they are standing there underneath 1\1/2\ or 2 feet of clear water. It
goes on and on. Bean stubble is the same way, little fixtures. You will
see also irrigation systems standing out in the water. In 8 feet of
water, there's an irrigation system standing there.
But this clear water that has emerged comes because the pressure from
the river, hydrostatic pressure from the river, pushes down on the
entire aquifer around there. As it pushes down, the water seeks its own
level, so the silt and floodwater pushes down into the soil. When it
does that, water equalizes, and it comes up out of the ground,
sometimes on the other side of the levy on the east side of the
interstate, in my case. It would be like the kind of water you would
find in a drainage tile or well. It comes up and sits on the surface
everywhere, clear and clean as can be, shutting down our transportation
units, our interstate highway, and flooding family farms and businesses
all up and down this river, and most of it has yet to reach St. Louis.
This is a problem all the way across Missouri, from St. Louis all the
way up into St. Joe and north. It's a problem for the entire Missouri
River bottom, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana.
To put it in perspective also, Mr. Speaker, the flow coming down this
river, when people think that the Corps of Engineers could have done
something different, marginally they could have, as I said, but they
would have had to have been clairvoyant, and they would have had to
have violated the terms of the Master Manual.
But the flow coming down the river at 150,000 cubic feet per second
happens to be the amount of water that's just coming out of the
Yellowstone River, itself. So those people who want to turn these
American rivers back to what they were before we managed them and
controlled them and built the Pick-Sloan Program, I would ask you all,
Mr. Speaker, to think: If 150,000 cubic feet per second is flowing out
of the Yellowstone River--and it is--and 150,000 cubic feet per second
is flowing past out of Gavins Point and past down through Sioux City,
if the Pick-Sloan Program had not been built, if we had no dams in the
Missouri River, if all the tributaries of the Missouri River were
completely dry except for the Yellowstone River, that little tributary
up there in Montana, we'd still have the same amount of water there
right now. It wouldn't last as long, but it would be as high as the
levels we have today. That's how much this helps us. We know those
other tributaries are flowing a lot of water. There's a massive amount.
It's more than ever before. It's 54 million acre-feet for this year. It
was a 500-year event in 1993. This is a 550-year event today.
So, Mr. Speaker, I have called upon the President to declare this
entire area a national disaster area. I know that Governor Branstad has
made that request. I know that the Governors in some of the States,
such as Nebraska and Montana, have made that request. I believe that
that request has been granted in a couple of cases, not yet for Iowa. I
know that Governor Branstad has made this request for Iowa. And I thank
the entire Iowa congressional delegation for joining with me in a
letter to President Obama in making the request that he declare this a
national disaster.
We have had a long time to be working with this water. A lot of
sandbags have been filled. Some more will be filled. Many have to be
emptied when this water goes down. And what we are going to need the
most is the prayers of the American people and perseverance.
So, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention to this matter. I
appreciate the Iowa delegation for standing with me and the delegations
up and down the river who have stood together. We need to stand with
the people whose property is under water and help them get through
this. They are stoic people. They are determined people. They are not
going to be standing there, complaining. They are going to be doing all
they can to help themselves. And to honor their efforts, I and others
are determined to do all we can to help them.
So that is the update on the 2011 flood, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate
your attention.

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