By Daniel Cusick
The 2019 Mississippi River (click here) flood fight is going to slog deep into the summer — and maybe much longer.
While communities north of St. Louis are beginning the expensive path to recovery after record-breaking winter and spring precipitation and runoff, people below the Missouri River are shoveling mud from their houses and praying for a dry spell.
The Lower Mississippi Valley remains in a flood crisis as high water continues to swamp streets, homes, businesses, sewage and water treatment plants, and farm fields, including across some of the poorest counties in the United States....
The levees are infrastructure. 30 levees is an entire river system. How is the water going to be contained when the levees are not intact. It is nearly an impossible situation because to control the river is to have the levees intact. So long as the flooding persists and the rain continues it is very difficult to rebuild levee systems.
...With prior floods, "it was a nuisance and then we were back in business," he added. "But the duration [of this flood] wears and tears on the minds of not only the business owners but the homeowners. I know several that are done."
As it stands, the river needs to drop an additional 4 feet to open Grafton's main street — the "Great River Road" — by the July 4 holiday.
Jared Gartman, chief of readiness and contingency operations for the Army Corps of Engineers' Mississippi Valley Division in Vicksburg, Miss., said most of the Army Corps districts in the basin have broken records for flood duration, in some places by weeks, and roughly 30 levees have been overtopped or breached in the lower basin....
