Army Corp Of Engineers Increases Water Output at Gavins Point Dam, Upriver From Flooding

Remember the Army Corps of Engineers in the Katrina disaster? Their handywork levee was the cause of the problem, not the storm. If this dam breaks on purpose or accident there will be a major nuclear crisis in America worse than Fukushima with several flooded powerplants and Omaha is alreay under a foot of water ..... "Flood water up to 2-feet deep is standing on the site of the 478-megawatt Fort Calhoun plant, which will stay shut down until the water recedes, the NRC said.

On Sunday afternoon, workers accidentally deflated an auxiliary berm at the plant, said Omaha Public Power District spokesman Jeff Hanson.

Hanson said the "aqua dam" was a supplemental measure that provided workers "more freedom" but was not essential to keeping the plant dry.

"The plant itself is still protected," Hanson said. Floodwater would need to rise over 7 feet to flow over the berms and enter the plant, Hanson said, adding that the supplemental dam was not in original flood prevention plans.

An NRC inspection at Fort Calhoun two years ago indicated deficiencies in the flood preparation area, which have now been remedied, the agency said."
"Imagine roughly 55 million acres — the entire surface of Nebraska and southwest Iowa — covered in a foot of water.

Now imagine trying to funnel all that water down a drainage canal surrounded by airports and homes, businesses and farms.

You can begin to grasp the unprecedented, slow-developing danger facing folks from Montana to Missouri from the Great Flood of 2011.

In more than a century of record-keeping, the nation's longest river has never coped with more water.

Floodwaters are breaching levees, triggering evacuations, closing highways, swamping thousands of acres of farmland, destroying homes and lapping against hurriedly reinforced floodwalls protecting cities, airports and power plants, including two in Nebraska that produce nuclear power.

The damage bill will tally in the hundreds of millions.

As bad as it's been, the hardest parts are still ahead, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the river system's managers.

"It's going to be a devastating season in terms of how the levees do," said Brig. Gen. John McMahon, commander of the corps' Northwestern Division. "There's going to be a lot of pain and suffering."

Frustration and questions along the river are rising, too. Elected officials, including the governors of Nebraska and Iowa, have criticized or called for investigations of the management of the Missouri by the corps.

"I think when this is over there needs to be a complete review of how the whole Missouri River basin has been handled by the corps," said Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad.

Last Sunday, leaders of the corps sat down with The World-Herald to explain their decisions and address public concerns.

They argued there was no way to predict the historically large late-May rainfall that drenched vast swaths of the semi-arid northern Plains and poured millions of acre-feet of water into the basin's reservoirs, filling space the corps says it had allocated for melting snow."