Even tamed, river a threat

“We dammed the river, and we thought it was safe — it became a playground. We had no idea we could get this much,” Yankton resident Judy Christensen said as she watched record amounts of water roar out of the Gavins Point Dam last week.
From Montana to Missouri, thousands of people are evacuating. Even tributaries, including the North Platte, are spilling out of their banks. Some areas already have been flooded while others have been warned by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maps showing they are guaranteed to flood.
With disaster proclamations already issued and millions of sandbags filled, the corps continues to send record amounts of water out of the six Missouri River reservoirs it manages.
It's all part of a balancing act that one corps official described as being “on a razor's edge.”
The corps' hope is that controlled flooding through at least late summer will prevent an even greater disaster.
“There have been other great tests of the system, but this will probably be the greatest,” said Dave Becker of the Corps of Engineers.
Becker is operations manager for Gavins Point Dam. Located between Niobrara, Neb., and Yankton, S.D., Gavins Point is the smallest and farthest downstream of the six major dams on the Missouri River.
Releases of water from Gavins Point affect the river's flow along the Nebraska-Iowa border.
“This is not only the largest flood event in 54 years that the dams have been here, it's the biggest flood in terms of total water in the last 113 years on the Missouri River,” Becker said.
Despite that volume, the dams are functioning as intended, said Col. Robert Ruch, commander of the corps' Omaha District, which manages the reservoirs in the Dakotas and Montana.
“I have total confidence in the structural integrity of the dams,” he said. “This is what they are designed to do and they are performing well.”