JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says that they plan on doing a better job of communicating with states along the Missouri River during 2012, but don’t plan on any more storage space for increased snow melt and rain than it did in 2011.
On Friday, the Corps released its operating plan for the upcoming year. In a statement, the corps will maintain what they call an “aggressive” schedule of water releases from dams along the Missouri River in Montana and the Dakotas throughout the spring and summer months if conditions are a repeat of last year.
Last summer, unprecedented snow melt and rain in Montana led to swollen reservoirs and serious flooding downstream in Iowa, Missouri and Kansas. The Corps has come under fire from state and federal elected officials over their handling of the floods.
The Corps announced that they will continue work on levees and other flood-control structures damaged by last summer’s record flooding as it can throughout the year.
In their statement, the Corps says that it does not have time to fix damaged structures along the river and clear more space to hold back water before spring, but they also say that there is a less than 10 percent chance that the upper Missouri River basin will receive the same levels of rain and snow melt as in 2011.
