[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 161 (Tuesday, October 25, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H7057-H7060]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        MISSOURI RIVER 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 honor to be recognized to 
address you here on the floor. And before I go into my presentation, I 
want to go into the subject matter the gentleman from Texas has led 
this previous Special Order on, just as a means of discussing a way to 
look at victims' rights.
  For me, I was caused to reexamine the situation as a victim. I had 
had some heavy equipment that was destroyed by vandals back in the year 
1987, a year that shall live in infamy. It was in the middle of the 
farm crisis years. A lot of that damage was uninsured, but we did catch 
the perpetrators. A long, long story; it was hundreds of thousands of 
dollars of damage. I followed through on everything, seeing myself as a 
victim who had an obligation to assist the prosecution as a citizen and 
a victim would and should. And I remember sitting in the courtroom in 
Sac City, Iowa, when they brought up the trial of one of the 
perpetrators. The bailiff announced to the court: This is the case of 
the State v. Jason Martin Powell. And I sat there thinking, how is it 
the State versus the perpetrator? I'm not in this equation. I'm not 
even the versus; I'm just here as a spectator. And so I began to 
examine what that really means. What it means is that the State and the 
law enforcement component, in this case the State, is the intervenor. 
If you have a grievance with someone, and I certainly had a grievance 
with the people that destroyed my equipment and nearly destroyed my 
business, before the law and order days, that would be settled in some 
other fashion, likely in some violent fashion. And if you go back a 
couple thousand years or 3,000 years before the law was established, 
like Mosaic law, or Roman or Greek law--but as law was established, it 
was to eliminate the vigilante component of this, and the State stepped 
in and intervened.
  Another way of looking at it would be when everything was owned by 
the State. The subjects in, let's say, old Western Europe, old England, 
the subjects were the property of the king. The State supplanted the 
king. The subjects and everything they owned were the property and the 
ownership of the king in England, so when you see old English common 
law and you see how it transfers into the United States, and it becomes 
the State v. Jason Martin Powell, the perpetrator, convicted 
perpetrator, I will say, and I can say his name in the record here now, 
that transfer was, if you committed a crime, you shot one of the king's 
deer, if you murdered or assaulted one of the king's subjects, you were 
committing a crime against the king. So in our society when you commit 
a crime, you are committing a crime against the State.
  I'm taking us all to this point, Mr. Speaker, because once the State 
is satisfied that they have established justice, the victim doesn't 
really have anything more to say about it. The victim is not in that 
equation. My position needs to be developed more than it is, but my 
point is if the State is going to intervene, then the State has to 
enforce the law, then the State has to protect the citizens adequately. 
And when they fail, then what's the obligation of the State? They are 
not ensuring us to be protected from violent crime. They're simply 
doing the best they can without a consequence for the State. All the 
way around that circle is this.

                              {time}  1750

  Back in those years, I remember a study that was done, and that study 
will come to me in a moment. It was a 1995 study. In that study, they 
put a value on each crime. And I remember that a rape victim--they 
valued murder at around a million dollars; rape at about $82,000. Now, 
I can't imagine who would submit to rape for $82,000 dollars, but that 
was the quantity.
  Then they also put in that study that a criminal who was loose on the 
street--an average criminal loose on the street--would commit $444,000 
worth of crime in a year. Well, it costs about $20,000 a year to lock 
them up. They do $444,000 worth of damage to the society in a year. But 
that damage is not compensated. That comes out of crime victims in 
great, huge, whopping chunks of their lives, their security, and their 
property.
  So I would just suggest that if the State were liable for all of the 
damage that's caused by perpetrators, we would have a more effective 
criminal justice system. I'm not advocating that we bring that forward 
in this Congress, but I just discuss that way of looking at this, how 
we got to the point where the State is the intervenor. Because the 
State is the successor to the Crown in old English common law, and a 
crime committed under the Crown was a crime committed against the King, 
because he owned everything, and it damaged his ability--even if it was 
the serf--to produce.
  So we are now the successor philosophy, but we've forgotten this 
part, that victims are paying the price. The State is not paying the 
price. It's no longer a crime against the State, even though the State 
is the intervenor.
  I would yield to the gentleman from Texas and thank him for 
presenting this. It just sparked that memory, and I wanted to put that 
into the Record and let you know how I think about crime victims.
  Mr. AL GREEN of Texas. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I 
especially thank you for placing things in a proper historical context. 
It's greatly appreciated.
  Having taught a class myself in trial simulation, one of the things 
that we discussed was the origin of the concept of the State. And it 
evolved to the extent that you've called to our attention, but it also 
became a ``we the people'' country. Our country is a ``we the

[[Page H7058]]

people'' country. And sometimes if we substitute for the State ``we the 
people,'' because it becomes the people in many places against the 
defendant, and I think it's appropriate that it be the people against 
the defendant.
  I think we as a society have some things that we will not tolerate, 
and, as a result, we have codified these things into laws that carry 
penalties with them. And these penalties, in my opinion, have to be 
imposed so as to maintain an orderly society.
  I would mention, to my friend, this. You have said $82,000 for rape. 
I just have to make sure that I go on record saying I agree with you; 
$82,000, I cannot imagine how someone managed to conclude that $82,000 
was the worth of a person having been raped or that crime itself.
  I support the notion that we must compensate victims. Victims ought 
to be compensated appropriately, which is one of the reasons why I have 
supported the Violence Against Women Act; and I'm hoping that we'll get 
it reauthorized, because it does establish a fund so that victims of 
crimes of this nature can have their perpetrators pay money into this 
fund so as to make sure that victims are properly compensated.
  I think you and I together, today, want to make sure that the 
people--we the people--are heard, and we the people in the courts of 
this country can take the necessary steps to not only prevent but also 
to compensate the victims of these dastardly deeds.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from 
Texas for making those points.
  We the people have vested our authority in our government, and that's 
how that transfer takes place. But I remember clearly the bailiff 
saying, ``The State versus,'' and that rang my bell; and I looked back 
through history to understand the root of that.
  I would point out also that the $82,000 for a rape victim, I believe, 
was quantified in this way--loss of work, medical treatment, 
psychological treatment; that kind of impact that was just simply the 
economic impact on her life, not the emotional impact and the trauma. 
But even still, to quantify that--and the Department of Justice has 
quantified crime also with different values. And I don't recall them 
well enough from that chart, but I know there's a 1992 Department of 
Justice study that laid some values out.
  I think it would be a plus for us, even though pain and suffering and 
the loss of life is immeasurable in a dollar form, if we could quantify 
it in a way we begin to understand what crime does to society. That 
would be helpful if we could move down that path. It's been a long time 
since there's been a real broad study done in this country that laid 
out the complete loss of all of the crimes in the United States that 
are committed. I would think it's in the billions of dollars. We accept 
it because it's a victim here and a victim there. It's not like they're 
all coming together in one large group. It's scattered out across our 
society. And the higher the level of crime in your community, the 
higher your tolerance has been because of the continual incidence of 
that violence.

  I appreciate the sentiment from the gentleman from Texas, and I 
wanted to add some words to the sentiment that you brought to the floor 
here tonight in this Congress.
  Mr. AL GREEN of Texas. I thank the gentleman for his comments. I 
greatly appreciate the time that you took from your time to continue to 
elaborate on this. It means a lot to the people that we both represent, 
and I thank you again.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, again, I thank the gentleman 
from Texas.
  I came here to talk about a couple of other subject matters, Mr. 
Speaker. The one that's on the front of my mind that I want to make 
sure I address is the Missouri River flooding that has taken place all 
down the Missouri River drainage area all summer long. I think for the 
rest of the country it hasn't been brought to their attention how bad 
and how devastating this flood is.
  You can pick your river in the world and you will know that every 
river has flooded in history. That's what they do. That's why we have 
river bottoms. They're flattened out because of the floods. Whether 
it's the Mississippi River flood or the Missouri River flood or any of 
the floods that we've had up and down--the New Jersey floods, for 
example, and the other floods in the northeast part of the United 
States--they have been devastating; and we have watched on television 
as we've seen people scramble to get above the waterline and to sandbag 
to protect the assets that they have.
  We watched as the water flooded into New Orleans several years ago 
with Katrina and the human suffering that went on down there. Some of 
us went down and did what we could. Myself, I've made four trips down 
after Katrina to try to lend a hand down there. I've contributed in 
some way, and I say humbly, in a small way, Mr. Speaker.
  But this summer, Midwesterners--people in Missouri and Kansas and 
Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana--have all 
suffered from the greatest runoff experienced in recorded history from 
the Missouri River. This greatest runoff is accumulated this way. It 
wasn't particularly dramatic in snowcap in the wintertime, not 
particularly dramatic by March 1 as they measure that snowcap, but 
several things contribute to the runoff. It's the snow up in the 
mountains all the way up into Montana; it's the rainfall that takes 
place there; and it's any dramatic rainfall events.
  All of those things came together in the perfect storm fashion--late 
season, significantly higher snowcap up in the mountains, and then 
early spring rains that saturated and became a significant runoff. On 
top of that, a very heavy rainfall event around particularly the 
Billings, Montana, area where they got 10 to 12 inches of rain; 8 
inches, I think, in Billings and 10 to 12 across a vast area, some of 
it up to 15 inches in some areas.
  So the circumstances were that we had all the snow that needed to 
come down--a large, large amount of snow. We had a lot more rain than 
expected. The ground was saturated so it didn't soak in. That was 
running off from broad rains across that had taken place in April and 
in May. And then on May 22, the massive rainfall that fell in the 
Billings area and around that was unprecedented in its volume. All of 
that together created a runoff that if you think of it in these terms, 
that the largest experience that they had seen was actually 1997. Prior 
to that was 1881.
  In 1881, there were 42 million acre-feet of runoff. That's water a 
foot deep over 42 million acres; all of that volume, if you just 
calculate that volume, running off into the Missouri River.

                              {time}  1800

  There are six dams that have been built in the upper Missouri River, 
reservoirs created by them. And these six dams start in Montana and 
string down through North Dakota and South Dakota. The furthest most 
downstream one is Gavins Point at Yankton, South Dakota, and that would 
be the last valve that controls the flow of the Missouri River from 
that point, just upstream from Sioux City, all the way down to St. 
Louis. That's the control valve at Gavins Point.
  Forty-two million acre-feet of runoff in 1981, 49 million acre-feet 
of runoff in 1997, 61--or I guess they said last night 60.4 million 
acre-feet of runoff this year in 2011, roughly 20 percent more than we 
had ever experienced before. If you would exempt '97, it was a third 
more than we had experienced in 1881. These six dams were designed to 
protect us downstream from serious downstream flooding in the largest 
runoff event experienced. That was 1881.
  He used the commonsense logic of the floods of 1881. The floods in 
1943, the floods in 1952 accelerated the construction of the Pick Sloan 
program. By 1968, we had built the six dams. They were completely 
operational for the full season of 1968. They were built to protect us 
from serious downstream flooding, and they were designed to the design 
elevations necessary to protect us from the largest runoff ever.
  And the Corps of Engineers has always held 16.3 million acre-feet of 
storage as the volume necessary to protect us from the largest runoff 
ever, 1881. That hasn't changed. Over five different versions of the 
master manual, the document that governs how they manage the river, 
hasn't changed at all; but neither had the largest experienced runoff 
in history, 1881.
  Now, I have to quantify that. The 49 million acre-feet in '97 was for 
the

[[Page H7059]]

breadth of the year. You compress the 1881 into several months--I 
believe 4 months of runoff, but it was a shorter period of time. So the 
monthly volume of runoff was greater in 1981 than it was in 1997. And 
so the Corps of Engineers had managed this all these years. In 113 
years, we had not seen the kind of runoff that we saw in 1881. But it 
was designed to protect us from the largest runoff ever.
  This year, we have the largest runoff ever, and the discharge that 
previously, coming out of Gavins Point, that last valve to release into 
the river that goes all the way to St. Louis, the largest discharge was 
70,000 cubic feet per second. This year, because of the large volume, 
the discharge became 160,000 cubic feet per second, substantially more 
than twice as much volume as we've ever seen before coming through 
Gavins Point. Designed for a large amount of that, it did hold together 
and the system held together very well upstream.
  But here's their problem, Mr. Speaker, and that is that the Corps of 
Engineers has determined that this runoff this year is an anomaly, that 
it's a 500-year event. And so in a 500-year event, they wouldn't change 
their management of the river substantially because they argue that 
it's unlikely that it will ever happen again.
  My response to that is, a year ago, standing here, no one knew we 
were going to get the runoff in 2011. The odds of this kind of flood 
happening that has happened to us in 2011 weren't any greater than they 
are for the same thing happening next year. And it's the equivalent 
of--the risks for 2012 are the same as they were for 2011 for a runoff 
of that magnitude for a number of reasons, but the simple one is this: 
if you flip a coin twice in a row and it comes up tails twice in a row, 
what are the odds it will come up tails three times in a row, the third 
time?
  Now, that's just one of those classic examples of statistics. You 
might think that the odds get to be one in six or something like that; 
but, truthfully, the odds are 50/50 that that coin will come up tails 
the third time in a row. If you flip it on its tail six times in a row, 
what are the odds that it will be tails the seventh time? Fifty/fifty, 
because we don't know next year whether there's going to be any more or 
any less runoff than we've had this year. The odds are the same, except 
that because of the damage to our system, our levees, and our storm 
protection, because of all of that damage, we're not as prepared to 
deal with a runoff of that magnitude as we were coming into 2011.
  So the risk is greater, even though the odds of it happening again 
next year are the same. And no one, no mortal that's looking at 113 
years of records--and maybe a little more than that--can tell you what 
a 500-year flood event is. It's not within the capabilities of mortal 
man.
  And the reasons are, because if you're going to calculate the odds of 
a 500-year event, you would have to look across several thousand years 
to try to find a pattern to see if you could make that prediction. How 
many times did this kind of runoff happen in the previous 2,000 years 
or the previous 3,000 years? I mean, 3,000 years would only be six 
different increments of 500-year events. Would it happen six times over 
3,000 years? Who knows. We have no records to go by. So it's a judgment 
call made by somebody sitting in an office somewhere--probably in 
Omaha--that this is a 500-year event. Therefore, they're not going to 
change the way they manage the river. They got by, okay, for 113 
years--not managing the river all that time, just since 1968. But this 
time we got burned really badly, Mr. Speaker.
  And I want to make this point, that to visualize this, this thing 
that Members of Congress haven't seen--not very many of us--the public 
hasn't seen hardly at all, think of this, think in our mind's eye of 
what it looks like to go up near the northwest corner of Iowa, South 
Dakota border--Sioux City, Iowa--and look at a Missouri River bottom 
that was flooded with water all summer long from around the first week 
in June until the first week in September.
  That's a mile and a half wide where normally it's a few hundred feet 
wide. And go downstream a few more miles and the river is 8 miles wide 
hill to hill. And go down stream a little further to Omaha, right where 
Interstate 680 goes across, and the water is 11 miles wide. And once it 
goes through Omaha, Council Bluffs and Glenwood, that's compressed it 
down within the levees that miraculously held or we would have had a 
similar-to-Katrina event in Council Bluffs where we had at least 30,000 
people living below the water level in their homes. If there's a breach 
in that dike, they get flooded like they did in New Orleans.

  But downstream from there, the river that was narrow enough to go 
through the cities widens out again four or five, six miles wide on 
down into Missouri--and Sam Graves can tell you the rest of that story. 
Now, that's water from hill to hill in many cases, and water that's not 
sitting there stagnant, Mr. Speaker. This is water that is flowing out 
in the channel, 11 to 12 miles an hour, and out against the hillside, 
oh, let's just say six miles away from the channel, or seven. That 
water is still flowing at four to five miles an hour, and 12, 14, 16 
feet deep. Farm buildings, businesses flooded up to the eaves--they're 
built on the highest piece of ground in the bottom, by the way--this 
water flowing at four or five miles an hour, dropping sand, debris--not 
as badly as I thought, but debris--and sand now that's laid out over 
thousands of acres, some of it 6 feet deep, everywhere, drifts of sand, 
dunes of sand that are 10 or 12 feet deep.
  The trees that are up and down the river that have stood in water for 
3 months, most of them will be dead next year. Farms have been 
destroyed. Thousands and thousands of acres have been destroyed. That's 
the magnitude of this flood.
  Now we have to put the pieces back together, and some people have 
lost a lot and they can't be made whole again. There are others that 
will find a way to put it back together. There is a lot of indecision 
with floods; that's the nature of floods. And we have trouble getting 
definitive answers to people. But if they're under water June, July, 
August, into September, if their building sites are surrounded by an 
ocean--and I have boated to these farm sites. I've flown over it a 
number of times, and they are sitting in the middle of an ocean where 
it might be five miles to dry land. And that's the happy family home 
where they've invested their future.
  We can, at the minimum--even though we have some programs, we have 
some individual disaster assistance, there is some ag assistance, there 
is also some public assistance for the public utilities that are there, 
but there is not enough to put the pieces back together. The least we 
can do is manage the river system so that this doesn't happen again 
with the similar runoff that we have this year.
  We built the Pick Sloan program, the six reservoirs to protect us 
from the largest runoff ever experienced. Now we have a larger runoff. 
I cannot comprehend how it isn't just simply an automatic to lower the 
water level marginally in the upper six reservoirs to have the storage 
capacity to protect us from this type of runoff.
  And just to do the math on it, the bill that I've introduced requires 
the Corps of Engineers to manage the river to protect us from serious 
downstream runoff in the event of the largest runoff in history. All it 
really does in the end is it replaces 1881 with a 2011 flood year.

                              {time}  1810

  It is not particularly complicated. Yes, they have to lower some 
water levels; but if those water levels are lowered, the effect of that 
isn't nearly as dramatic as some of the people have described.
  First there were some, I will say, some things that alarmed people 
when the Corps announced that they would have to lower the water levels 
12 feet, and that was too much, and they couldn't manage the river. I 
looked into that. It was 12 feet on the upper three reservoirs, not on 
all six; and that was with 70,000 cubic feet per second at discharge at 
Gavins Point, that lowest valve that we have there just upstream from 
Sioux City.
  After a series of questions, they did another analysis. They raised 
the flow of discharge up to 100,000 cubic feet per second, and just the 
adjustment of that in the upper three reservoirs changed the 12-foot 
lowering level elevation down to six.
  We should be able to deal with six because, historically, since 1968, 
on average, Fort Peck has been 7.4 feet below

[[Page H7060]]

the target elevation. We just lower the target elevation 6 feet; it's 
still higher than the average of what Fort Peck was. That's also true 
of each of the dams in the top three, which are the only ones they 
wanted to adjust because they're the largest.
  So that's the effect of the bill, but it also has the effect of 
protecting us from flooding, serious flooding downstream. And I'm 
asking my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, to sign on to this bill, 
particularly those who represent the Missouri River bottom area, those 
of us who have been affected by the flood, those of us who represent 
Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and 
Missouri. And by the way, all the delegation in Iowa, Democrats and 
Republicans, have signed on and endorsed the bill. Most of Nebraska 
has. A lot of the Missourians that are affected have.
  I'd ask the others, take a look. This isn't complicated. The red 
herrings that have been drug across the trail have been addressed and 
corrected. And the meeting last night in Omaha was, I will say, 
volatile and dynamic with people that have suffered all summer long. 
They want to be able to make plans on whether they should be investing 
in trying to put their farms back in shape. They can't do that, Mr. 
Speaker, unless we give them some assurance that we're going to manage 
the river to protect them from serious downstream flooding.
  And while that's going on, we just set that highest priority up. 
Congress has the authority, in fact, we have the obligation to set the 
standards for the Corps of Engineers. If we fail to do that, they are, 
then, whip-sawed by all of the litigation that comes of all the special 
interests. Those special interests can be taken care of below the level 
that I'm suggesting, and they can have those same levels of priorities 
that they had within that--irrigation, barge traffic, electrical 
generation, recreation, fishing. All of those things can work at that 
level without hardly even noticing it upstream. But you notice it 
downstream, and the billions of dollars that it takes to put this back 
together from the damage can never be matched by the recreational 
investment that goes on upstream. They'll have it anyway. It won't be 
diminished in any appreciable way. We need to have the protection.
  Mr. Speaker, I believe that's H.R. 2942. I have trouble remembering 
that bill number. I could be wrong. It's the King bill, and I 
appreciate all those that have cosponsored it; and I'm hopeful that the 
rest of the Missouri River Representatives will take a look at it. I'm 
under the understanding that there will be a companion bill introduced 
in the Senate. Hopefully, it will be bipartisan. That will give us some 
more incentive to get this done this fall while there's still time to 
address this issue. If we fail to do so, this river will be managed for 
another year the same way it was in this past year.
  Could I inquire as to the amount of time I have remaining?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman has 2 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  I will then just conclude this discussion on the river and not 
address any other subject matter.
  We have not, as a Congress, looked at this Missouri River issue. It's 
a natural disaster that has been, to some degree, mitigated by the 
Corps of Engineers. Some of those decisions were awfully tough on a lot 
of people, and I believe we have an obligation to manage this river 
system, to protect us from serious downstream flooding, to set that 
priority and to set the levels, not at 16.3 million acre-feet anymore, 
that was 1881, but to increase those million acre-feet, not all that 
much, but enough to protect us from that serious downstream flooding.
  If the Members of Congress that represent those areas come together 
unanimously, we can move a piece of legislation through this Congress, 
and I would think we could do it under suspension. It's a no-cost piece 
of legislation. It is a commonsense piece of legislation. It really 
isn't all that tricky, although we went through all 450 pages of the 
master manual, and it was hard to write; but now it's a pretty simple 
solution to a complex problem. I would urge my colleagues to take a 
look.
  I would thank all of those involved for their public statements last 
night in Omaha and all the meetings that will be taking place up and 
down the river. I thank the Corps of Engineers for their cooperation in 
getting me accurate data to work with. And I look forward to resolving 
this issue, at least for the long term, while we help put people back 
together in an individual basis in the short term.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, thank you for your attention, and I yield 
back the balance of my time.

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