Experts expect more Missouri River levee failures - according to MSNBC

Not surprising, but not good news. The last thing the mid-west needs is more flooding from levee failures.

According to the article (which can be read here www.msnbc.msn.com... )

"Most of the levees are agricultural levees. They're not engineered. They're just dirt piled up," said David Rogers, an engineering professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology

The Corps predicts that the river will eventually rise high enough to flow over some 18 to 70 levees, mostly in rural areas of southeast Nebraska, southwest Iowa and Missouri. Other levees will become saturated, and water can erode their foundations, seep underneath or find other flaws to exploit.

Omaha's main floodwall, for instance, is built to contain a river 40 feet deep — which is 4 feet higher than the river is expected to reach. But several of the rural levees in northwest Missouri are more than 2 feet shorter than the river's expected crest, and some have already been exceeded. Even stronger urban floodwalls and levees can falter against the destructive force of floodwaters. As a precaution, officials in Omaha and across the river in Council Bluffs, Iowa, have developed plans to evacuate roughly 40,000 people from areas near the river in case a levee fails.

The flooding along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers this year has parallels to the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. In each case, levees and flood protection systems overseen by the corps and maintained by local levee districts proved inadequate against the massive amount of water. But they're not an exact comparison. The levees that failed around New Orleans were protecting against the fierce, but short-lived, assault of hurricanes. The flooding taking place in the Missouri River valley has been building for weeks and the high water is set to last all summer. It's important to remember that levees and floodwalls only reduce the flooding risk, LaRandeau says, but don't eliminate it. "The whole system is going to be under pressure," he said.