How the Army Corps Manages the Missouri River

All Things Considered:

Farmer Don Diltz of Glenwood, Iowa, was one of the first to feel the effects earlier this week. "Flooding is a part of life down here; you take that and accept it and move on," he says. "But this is unique. Most floods come and they leave; this flood's coming and it's going to stay for six months."
Jody Farhat, the chief of the Missouri River Basin Water Management Office in Omaha, Neb., is in charge of water management for the area.
"It's difficult to see the impacts of these historic releases on individuals and communities," Farhat says. "My staff and I are making those release decisions based on the information coming in every day."
These decisions are also made according to the Missouri Water Control Manual, referred to as the "master manual." It's a handbook written by the Corps with input from Congress, and it dictates the Corps' priorities. Some are easy to follow, like flood control, but others are more difficult to navigate, like keeping reservoirs full even when there's heavy snowpack, so tourists can take boats out and power companies can use water flow.
The manual makes life tough for the Corps, which is bound by law to follow its recommendations, former Corps head Mike Parker says.
"It's a political document," he says. "Several years ago, Congress decided you have a lot of interests out there, and these interests got together and said, 'We're not getting represented.' So instead of having navigation and flood control as being the two primary things that the Corps was looking at, they had a list of eight things that they had to consider."
In addition to navigation and flood control, this list of priorities includes irrigation, water supply, hydropower, fish and wildlife, recreation and water quality. Parker says that some of these priorities run counter to one another.
"If the Corps only had to take care of navigation and flood control, I guarantee you those levels [in the Missouri River reservoirs] would have been much lower," he says.

I vaguely remember hearing that there were debates about the management of the Missouri River a few years back.  I guess this answers my post from a couple of weeks back.  While the Corps wasn't screwing up, they were following a plan which doesn't only focus on navigation and flood control.  This will make future debates very interesting.  In the end, I think folks are better off with reservoirs which are managed in a suboptimal manner than in a situation with no reservoirs.  Also, with the large snowpack and extreme rain events, there were likely to be pretty significant problems anyway.  Part of the reason the Corps kept the reservoirs closed until they were completely full was to allow time to prepare downstream.