A bill to make it easier for levee districts along the Upper Mississippi River to raise their flood protection mechanisms is going before Congress.
The Upper Mississippi River Levee Safety Act, introduced this week by Illinois Rep. Mary Miller, R-Oakland, calls on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to update the flood probabilities it uses to set the design standards for levees and floodwalls at least every 20 years.
The legislation would also allow levee districts to maintain their levees or floodwalls at the levels established by those updates from the Corps. It would cover federal levees or floodwalls between Guttenberg, Iowa, and Hamburg, Illinois, and levees south to Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
Illinois Reps. Mike Bost, R-Murphysboro; Daren LaHood, R-Peoria, and Eric Sorensen, D-Moline, are also sponsors.
“It allows levee districts to maintain their level of protection, and that’s basically a requirement of FEMA accreditation,” said Mike Klingner, chair of the Upper Mississippi, Illinois and Missouri Rivers Association, which endorses the bill.
This is not the reality now, he said.
A levee district accredited to protect against a flood with a 1% chance of happening must go through an often lengthy and expensive process to keep up with changing potential flood levels, Klingner explained.
“What we’re trying to do here is just clarify that if flood profiles change, there’s an ability to maintain (a levee),” he said.
To make changes right now, levee districts must model the risk from different flooding scenarios and how their flood protection measures may affect other communities, Klingner said. It’s part of a change implemented years ago by the Corps when it comes to changing Corps Civil Works projects, including levees, he added.
“They adopted this internal change in their policy that makes it extremely difficult, in fact, basically impossible for a levee district in the Upper Mississippi to maintain their levees,” Klingner said. “It’s in conflict with basic common sense.”
This kind bill, if passed into law, could allow levee districts to chase their accreditation status, said Olivia Dorothy, Mississippi River restoration director with American Rivers.
“What this legislation would do would be to allow levee districts to automatically build up that levee,” she said. “That’s where it gets really dangerous.”
Dorothy said she is sympathetic to the difficult reality levee districts face when trying to keep up with dynamic river systems and flood potentials that are constantly changing. But she added the level of scrutiny districts must go through when considering alterations is vital to ensuring river communities stay safe.
“Water has to go somewhere,” she said. “If you’re always increasing the height of your levees, and nobody around you knows what you’re doing, then it becomes dangerous because you don’t know where that water is going to go.”
With climate change making floods last longer and bringing more extreme precipitation events, Dorothy said it’s more important than ever to have a clear understanding how and where water will move through the country’s river systems.
“Part of answering that question is getting basic information from levee districts when they’re making modifications to their system as part of that permitting process,” she said. “To do away with that and allow levee districts to make modifications without that check is dangerous. It literally puts peoples lives at risk.”
Klingner contends the bill would not allow unchecked alterations, they would just need to meet the previous standards local levee districts agreed to when many levees were first constructed.
“Any modification or adjustment to the (levee) would have to go through Corps approval,” he said.
