A Low-Water Tour of the Mississippi River

August 20, 2012, 10:58 am

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

ABOARD THE MOTOR VESSEL MISSISSIPPI, at Alton, Illinois - The big room was crowded on Friday with people who had gathered mainly to complain. It's the annual low-water inspection tour, a summer ritual of the Mississippi River Commission, two weeks of travel and talk in which the panel that advises the Army Corps of Engineers on managing the mighty river and its tributaries speaks directly with the American people in their own towns, on their rivers. The tour was immortalized in a 1987 essay in The New Yorker by John McPhee titled “Atchafalaya.” That essay appeared in his wonderful 1990 book, “The Control of Nature.”

Congress formed the commission in 1879 in hopes of quieting the regional squabb les over methods of flood control, navigation and uses of the bounteous water. Some of those fights are still going on â€" water is a commodity worth fighting over.

The low-water tour (a high-water tour is conducted in the spring) takes place on the Motor Vessel Mississippi. The current Mississippi, the fifth towboat in Corps history to bear the name, is the largest towboat ever constructed in the United States. It was built in 1993. It's been fitted out by the Corps with formal meeting rooms and a pilot house fit for entertaining, with deep leather couches and enough floor space to outdo many New York apartments. When it's not being used for the tours, it makes its way around the lower Mississippi laying enormous concrete mats that stabilize the river banks.

The Mississippi River Commission, founded in 1879, is in the business of making the least number of people possible unhappy; everyone wants something different from the river . Brig. Gen. Margaret W. Burcham, a member of the commission, said that on this year's trip, gas drillers in North Dakota have expressed their need to use enormous quantities of water from the upper Mississippi for fracking, but farmers farther downstream want that water for irrigation; while others want the water in the river so they can get their good to market on barges. And there are many stops to go on the tour, and many more people to hear from. This week the tour will be heading to Memphis, where navigation issues on the drought-shrunken river will no doubt loom large.

More than 100 people showed up at Alton, not far up the river from St. Louis and a town that flooded catastrophically in 1993, and 27 spoke. The meeting began at 9 a.m. and ran until nearly 12:30; 27 people spoke, including environmentalists, barge operators, farmers and politicians.

A few speakers talked about the much-debated decision during last year's floods to blow the levees along a 135,000-acre spillway â€" the first time the spillway had been used since the flood of 1937. The breach caused the dangerously high water levels near Cairo, Illinois and below to drop by some two feet, and has been credited with avoiding sudden disaster elsewhere. Many have criticized the decision to put so much rich farmland under water, but Arlan R. Juhl, director of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, argued that the corps had actually waited too long in deciding whether or not to blow the levee while floodwaters rose in Illinois. “During the last days, while you were struggling with that, we had many people sitting in the water, and the water was getting deeper.”

Others wanted to discuss the contentious issue of the levee system across the Mississippi from St. Louis, which has been declared substandard by the Corps. Locals are trying to come up with interim fixes that will provide enough protection to avoid a federal requirement that homes and busin esses buy flood insurance, but have bristled at having to meet corps standards for federal levees in doing so. Talks are ongoing, but the statements about the matter â€" for and against the Corps â€" were passionate. Patrick McKeehan, an engineering consultant who has worked with the Illinois communities on the problem, called the Corps position “devastating.” But Kathy Andria, of the American Bottom Conservancy, called for maintaining the Corps' standards of construction and design, asking, “What's to become of us when our levees give?” And, she added, “Notice that I said when, not if.”

The final speaker, Jim Bensman, gave a statement that veered from liberal to libertarian, speaking about “getting the military out of the Corps of Engineers” and cutting the federal budget deficit by getting rid of the commission entirely. “You guys are just lackeys for the barge industry â€" they can hire their own lobbyists.”

In closing the session, R. D. James, a member of the commission since 1981, apologized for the need to limit speakers to 5 minutes apiece, joking that a luncheon was waiting for all who attended, and if the limit “had not been initiated, we'd all starve to death, probably.”

He thanked people for coming and for expressing their views, which he said could influence corps policy on the river. “Continue the dialogue,” he said. “'Push, push, push â€" never give up' gets the job done.”