For weeks now, my sister has been emailing me news links and photos of the Missouri River escaping its banks upstream of my hometown in Iowa. Everyone back home just keeps saying it: The flood is coming. The flood is coming.
The road to home is starting to close. Parts of I-29 between Kansas City and Omaha will be shut down if necessary. The levees in Hamburg, Iowa were breached yesterday. Amtrack stopped the trains through Iowa yesterday.
It's not rain. It's earlier rain, and release rates from upstream dams. I asked Pa what it all meant, what caused it, and he started talking about the Army Corps of Engineers and planned releases from dams and cubic feet per second of water twice to three times the normal amount due to early rain and significantly higher snowmelt in Montana. None of it made much sense to me.
Here's how the Corps of Engineers explained cubic feet:
A cubic foot of water can be compared to the size of a basketball, Jacobson said. On Wednesday, the Missouri River was 21.8 feet at Boonville, half a foot above flood stage, and was flowing at 166,000 cubic feet per second. Imagine watching 166,000 basketballs fly by every second, as Jacobson explains it. The Corps' forecast doubles that by the middle of the month.
Farmers are going to lose entire crops. Insurance won't cover the entire loss, not by a long shot. Hamburg pretty much needs to move its entire town. Businesses shut down, houses under water.
Sometimes I wonder if it's better to get hit out of the clear blue sky, like with a tornado, or whether it's better to have weeks and months to plan, like this flood.
I'm glad my family was able to move some stored crops out of the way so perhaps those won't be lost. I'm glad people are able to evacuate. But there's also the psychological impact of knowing the water is coming and there's really nothing you can do about it. The cubic feet per second are just too great.
Here in Kansas City, Parkville is the community most affected by the river. They're planning to hold back the river with tarp and sandbags. We've always groused Kansas City doesn't make enough of its riverfront, but maybe in this case that's a good thing.
Warning, no warning: Loss is loss. Maybe knowing in advance doesn't mean a thing if you're going to lose it all, anyway.
I asked Pa if there was going to be a blame game, and he said there always is with these sorts of things, but I think this one may be just too many cubic feet of water per second. Too much rain. Too much snowmelt.
The weather is changing, and the days in which we benefited from living by the river may have floated away with yesterday's barges and canoes.
