Politicians and Engineers

All Things Considered revisits the debate about the Army Corps of Engineers handling of flooding on the Missouri River:

MCCAMMON: Jody Farhat is the chief of Corps' Missouri River Basin Water Management Office in Omaha, where decisions about water releases are made. She says any flooding is regrettable, but in a record year like this it's also unavoidable. She says the reservoirs are normally kept mostly full to support activities like recreation, navigation and hydropower. Think of a bathtub.
JODY FARHAT: What happened though, this year, that rain came in and filled up our bathtub and we still have essentially a fire hose coming into the reservoir system, with that mountain snowpack standing up there 135 to 140 percent of normal. So we needed a bigger drain.
MCCAMMON: But some elected leaders in downstream states say the Corps should leave more room in that bathtub to respond to floods. They accuse the Corps of favoring upstream states who, in normal years, want to hold back enough water for recreation.
Kansas Governor Sam Brownback wants an investigation of the Corps' management. Iowa's governor, Terry Branstad, has urged his colleagues in downstream states to form a group devoted to promoting their interests. He says the Missouri River Master Manual, a complicated series of guidelines last updated in 2004, just isn't working.
Governor TERRY BRANSTAD: When you have that kind of snowfall, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure they should have been releasing more, earlier.
MIKE HAYDEN: One of the mistakes people make is thinking that the dams will provide flood protection.
MCCAMMON: That's Mike Hayden, a former Kansas governor and now executive director of the Missouri River Association of States and Tribes. He says dams can only reduce flooding, and he argues that letting water out of the reservoirs earlier would've caused even more problems on the Mississippi River.
HAYDEN: The rivers are connected. So when a drop of water falls at Three Forks, Montana, it ends up in New Orleans.
MCCAMMON: The Corps points out that communities up and down the Missouri River have flooded this year, the wettest since at least 1898. And if there's anything folks from Montana to Louisiana can agree on, it's the hope that a season this wet won't come around for another century.

I find this discussion very interesting, for a couple of reasons.  First, politicians generally don't understand hydrology and hydraulics.  The water is coming, and the dams can only hold so much back.  From what I heard, the Corps held back as much as they could, for as long as they could, so towns downstream could prepare for the floods as much as possible.  If they had released some of the water, flooding downstream would have come sooner, before the towns could adequately prepare, and the reservoirs still would have filled up.  Now, some other factors have been figured in, such as storing water to guarantee recreation or navigation during the summer, but those were all politically determined previously.  Don't get me wrong, engineers do make mistakes, but quite often, their hands are tied. 

Secondly, the politicians are complaining about the feds, because they can score some political points with the voters, but in the long run, it undermines good governance.  Unfortunately, most of the governors in the region are Republicans, so attacking the federal government as ineffective is good politics for them.  If the politicians don't like the flood control policy, tell the engineers how they want it changed.  The engineers will tell them what good and bad effects such a change will have, and the politicians can sign off on it.  Next time, politicians, don't bitch, you demagoguing jerks.