Western Drought Shrinking Big Muddy
About 70% of the Missouri's normal flow comes from melting snow in Montana, where state officials say it would take 350% of normal snowfall to mend the damage. This winter's yield: about 65%.
April 28, 2005
By Patrick O'Driscoll and Tom Kenworthy, USA TODAY
FORT PECK, Mont. — The "Big Muddy" is in big trouble.
Photo: White boat docks at Fort Stevenson State Park near Garrison, N.D., are now
surrounded by vegetation. By Stu Merry, The McLean County Independent via AP
The Missouri River, the nation's longest, is struggling in the dry clutches of a multiyear drought. For six years, the river's three giant reservoirs on the northern Plains have dropped slowly and alarmingly, curbing recreation, hydropower generation and commercial navigation downstream. While the drought's effects are not irreversible, river managers say it will take years for the waterway and its many users to recover.
"We're kind of in uncharted territory here," says Rose Hargrave, Missouri River program manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the river's six dams and the lakes behind them. "Reservoir levels have never been so low. The Plains snow pack is almost non-existent. It's not looking good." Related photo gallery: (A Reservoir Runs Dry)
From its roaring headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to its slow, wide confluence with the Mississippi River, the Missouri is a 2,540-mile ribbon of frontier history, world-class fishing, billions of dollars of commerce and drinking water for millions. But years of sparse snowfall at the river's source have so reduced its flow that disruptions ripple all the way to the Mississippi.
When Fort Peck Lake here is full, it sprawls 134 miles across the prairie of northeastern Montana, drawing thousands of anglers in search of trophy walleye and other game fish. But now the USA's fifth-largest reservoir is a shrinking pool. Sixty-five years after it was created by a monster earthen dam across the Missouri, the lake level is 36 feet below average and could fall another 15 feet by this time next year.
Downriver in North Dakota, 231-mile-long Lake Oahe, the nation's fourth-largest reservoir, is so low that it literally has left the state. From Bismarck to the South Dakota border, more than 60 miles have reverted to a narrow river where the lake was once up to 5 miles wide. Left behind are weedy mud flats and boat ramps stranded a mile or more from water.
The retreat of Fort Peck, Oahe and even bigger Lake Sakakawea in North Dakota is only the most obvious sign of distress. The water deficit also threatens farming and ranching, tourism, power production, shipping and the water supply for a 10-state basin. This year, "we may not be able to place a pump in the river," says farmer Neal Turnbull of Brockton, Mont., whose 550 acres of grain crops are in jeopardy without irrigation.
The drought has even clouded the outlook for this year's bicentennial celebration of the Lewis & Clark expedition, the fabled voyage of American discovery that used the Missouri as its highway through the wilderness.
The Corps of Engineers forecasts this year's flow at 16.7 million acre-feet of water, one-third less than normal. Storage behind the Missouri's six dams is now almost 21 million acre-feet below normal. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, the amount used annually by two to three families.
About 70% of the Missouri's normal flow comes from melting snow in Montana, where state officials say it would take 350% of normal snowfall to mend the damage. This winter's yield: about 65%.
'DRY SPONGES FOR SOIL'
Gov. Brian Schweitzer says much of Montana's runoff will soak into the ground before reaching the river because "we have dry sponges for soil." He has asked the Pentagon to rotate some of Montana's 1,500 National Guard troops home from Iraq this summer to help fight the wildfires expected because the state's forests are so dry.
The drought's litany of effects on the Missouri is long and painful:
•Drinking water. Riverside towns are spending millions to add or refurbish water intakes so they can reach farther and deeper into the shrinking river. Fort Yates, N.D., on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, went dry for five days last Thanksgiving when its Lake Oahe pumps clogged with sediment. It paid $3 million for a temporary fix. Kansas City, Mo., which draws 200 million gallons a day in summer, has installed new pumps twice as deep as its permanent intakes.
•Hydropower. The river's dams normally generate about 10 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, worth about $1.7 billion. In the drought, annual production is off at least one-third. This year's forecast is for just 5.8 billion kilowatt-hours. To make up the difference for its customers, the federal Western Area Power Administration has spent $64 million since October for costlier extra power. It will spend nearly twice that by the end of September. After two rate increases, a third is in the works.
•Tourism. Fishing on the reservoirs in Montana and the Dakotas generates hundreds of millions of dollars in a region where farming is the only other major industry. But traffic at parks, campgrounds and marinas is down because dozens of boat ramps are unreachable.
•Agriculture. Some farmers have abandoned irrigation because they can't afford to "chase the river" with longer intake pipes. Lakefront ranchers, who pen livestock with fences that reach into the reservoirs, must extend fences as the water ebbs so cattle won't stray around them. In Nebraska, farmers on two Missouri tributaries will be paid not to irrigate up to 100,000 acres of crops for the next 10-15 years in an effort to save water.
•Shipping. The barge trade, never huge, has shrunk to 8 million tons a year, a tiny fraction of what is shipped on the Mississippi and other waterways. MEMCO Barge Line, the largest operator, hasn't run a barge up the Missouri in two years.
•Cooling water. Nuclear and other non-hydroelectric plants that use river water for cooling must lower its temperature before piping it back into the Missouri. That's because the current is too low to dilute the return flow of warmer water enough to meet limits that protect fish and the ecosystem. A plant in Kansas is building a $20 million cooling tower.
•Wildfire. Several states fear catastrophic summer fires in dry forests and plains. Grass and timber fires in February and March surprised firefighters in Oregon, Idaho, Montana and South Dakota. "To be concerned about a fire season in March in this neck of the woods is unheard of," says Richard Opper, head of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.
•Artifacts. Indian relics, old homesteads and tribal graves, inundated when the reservoirs were filled, are re-emerging and may become targets for looters. "They find some of these graves and actually sell the skeletons," says Charles Murphy, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
•Endangered wildlife. Lack of water has canceled an experimental "spring rise" of the river next year to improve habitat and breeding for a rare fish, the pallid sturgeon. That artificial "flush" by releasing more water from Fort Peck Dam would mimic the Missouri's natural flow. But Mike Olson of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says unless "biblical rainstorms" come, the surge won't happen until 2010 or 2011 at the earliest.
There is still enough water for boating and world-class walleye fishing. But as the lakes fall, the water warms, threatening the survival of smelt, a small fish on which the game fish feed. Recovery from a smelt die-off would take years.
"It's just like someone coming in and shutting down Ford or General Motors in Detroit," says Dick Messerly, manager of Fort Stevenson State Park near Garrison, N.D.
In Montana, renowned for its $350 million sport fishing industry, "we see significant impacts," says Ron Aasheim, a state conservation officer. Fishing restrictions and even bans have been imposed on gold-medal streams such as the Big Hole, Madison and Blackfoot rivers to protect trout weakened by the warmer, low-flowing water.
"I've seen dry years over my lifetime in the Dakotas, but this is by far the worst," says Emmonds County, N.D., farmer Ken Moser, 64, whose grandparents homesteaded on the Missouri in the 1880s. He says the family gave up "a lot of" riverfront acreage to the Corps of Engineers when Lake Oahe was filled in the 1960s in return for irrigation water. "Now we're high and dry." Moser's irrigation intake is now a mile and a quarter from the river channel. His $2 million sprinkler system has been idle for two years, and 1,100 acres have been turned from corn back to dryland crops that yield far less.
"It won't be enough. It's just going to put us way behind," says Moser, who has asked the corps for permission to dig an emergency trench from the Missouri to his parched fields.
SHORTAGE OF SNOW THE CULPRIT
For nearly a decade, the West's drought has crept across more familiar terrain: Dead forests in California and New Mexico, shrinking desert reservoirs in Arizona, Utah and Nevada, vast wildfires in Alaska, and brown lawns everywhere.
Meanwhile, a less-visible deficit has wilted the Missouri's headwaters region. This winter, Montana golfers were playing on courses normally buried in white until April or May. Lack of snow scuttled snowmobile and dog sled events.
The worst has arrived almost exactly 200 years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark reached the river's source on their westward search for a route to the Pacific. In July 1805, the explorers stopped at what today is Three Forks, Mont., where three tributaries form the river.
In his journal, Lewis took note, with customary misspelling, of how full the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin rivers were: "All of them run with great valocity and thow out large bodies of water."
Lewis might not recognize the streams this spring and summer. An index that measures available water supplies lists 39 of Montana's 52 rivers in "very dry" conditions.
The big reservoirs would be in far better shape, says Gov. Schweitzer, if not for political decisions that favor what he calls "barge traffic that doesn't exist" on the lower river in the state of Missouri.
Shipping has long been a sore point. States upriver, dependent on tourism, complain that federal managers release too much reservoir water for barge traffic. States in the lower basin, where the Missouri is a channelized ditch adapted to commercial traffic, claim the feds hold back too much in the lakes, threatening river transport of goods. Farmers fear if barge traffic is cut off, railroads and trucking companies will charge higher rates and cripple agriculture.
By law, the Corps of Engineers must manage the river for eight different uses in commerce, recreation, ecology and flood control. In a drought, "we have to try to provide service to each of those, but at a reduced level," says Paul Johnston of the agency's Omaha office.
But if reservoir storage slips below 31 million acre-feet — it is now about 35 million and falling — the corps must cease flows for barge traffic. Unless the forecast changes, the Missouri will hit that "navigation preclude" next year. The corps already plans to cut short this year's season by two months.
Even if navigation flows cease, the water savings will be small, Johnston says, because the corps still must supply drinking water downstream. He says the lakes might only rise a foot or two.
The drought also could muffle a tourism boom expected from the Lewis & Clark bicentennial.
"We're very concerned," says Clint Blackwood, executive director for the observance in Montana, where some of the biggest gatherings are planned.
If Montana has a wildfire season like it did in 2000, when nearly a million acres burned statewide, Blackwood knows what could happen. "The news media will report that Montana is on fire," he says. "And it takes only a little bit of that and people then (say), 'I'm not going to Montana this year.' "
But the most visible sign of drought remains on the reservoirs. Lake Sakakawea, named for the Indian woman who guided and translated for Lewis & Clark (her name often is spelled Sacajawea), is down 50 feet from its high-water mark in 1997. By summer's end, Lake Oahe could be 54 feet below its record level that same year.
TO FISH, 'TAKE YOUR OWN WATER'
Allan Burke, publisher of the Emmons County Record in Linton, N.D., says many locals have sold their boats. He recounts a grim joke told in town is that "you can go fishing, but you have to take your own water." This winter was the first in memory without ice fishing on nearby Beaver Bay, an inlet off Lake Oahe just above the South Dakota line. That's because Beaver Bay is gone, too. So is most of the tourist trade at Bosch's Bayside, a small resort there.
"People don't come anymore," laments Randy Bosch, 47, who says he had just four overnight campers in his 40-space RV park in all of 2004. He may have to close for good this year. Bosch says he doesn't go down anymore to where the bay used to be, except "when the TV crews come" to shoot drought footage. "I can't," he explains. "I get too upset."
Contributing: O'Driscoll reported from Denver, Kenworthy from Fort Peck, Mont.
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