Missouri River

“The cottonwoods on the Missouri River are already mostly gone . . . And the ones that are remaining are declining . . . “And so the preexisting forest, some of that forest remains and is aging in place . . . But we’re not making new forests because the river is not moving around anymore.”

"The Missouri is America’s longest river, flowing more than 2,300 miles, with a watershed encompassing one-sixth of the United States. Once a wide, meandering, dynamic river that spread out over its ecologically rich floodplains, today’s Missouri River has been constricted to meet conflicting water resource demands, including flood control, navigation, irrigation, hydropower, water supply, water quality, recreation and fish and wildlife habitat. The lower Missouri River from Sioux City to St. Louis is artificially confined by hundreds of miles of levees that have destroyed the dynamic features of the river, including side channels, chutes, shallow and slack water areas, sandbars and islands. This loss of diverse habitat has resulted in the federal listings of multiple species."

"For the first decade of the century, the Upper Missouri River Basin was the driest it’s been in 1,200 years, even more parched than during the disastrous Dust Bowl of the 1930s . . . The drop in water level at the mouth of the Missouri — the country’s longest river — was due to rising temperatures linked to climate change that reduced the amount of snowfall in the Rocky Mountains in Montana and North Dakota . . . Prolonged drought can disrupt agriculture and hurt economies, the researchers said. It affects dams that manage water resources and slows commercial traffic in rivers. On top of that, it harms marine life that must cope with lower water levels and animals such as waterfowl that rely on fish to survive."

"These are fish that are as old as the dinosaurs . . . None of their evolution took place in a river that looks like this, that’s swift and narrow and deep. Their Missouri River was wide and shallow with shifting sandbars and floodplains accessible in the spring floods . . . [The fish] have never been in a river before . . . Especially with the river at this flood stage, you don’t want to throw them out into the main channel with the really swift current . . . They’re such an ancient fish,” she said. “You think about all the changes that this fish has gone through in millions and millions of years, and now it's going to die out if we don’t do something.”

"In July 2019, South Dakota Game, Fish & Parks officials confirmed of presence of zebra mussels in Lake Sharpe near Fort Thompson after U.S. Army Corps of Engineers staff initially discovered them while performing inspections on Big Bend Dam . . . Zebra mussels are small, fingernail-sized, freshwater mussels that are native to Eastern Europe and Western Russia. They likely arrived in the United States’ Great Lakes in the 1980s via the discharge of ballast water by cargo ships from Europe. Adults are usually less than one inch in size and will attach themselves to practically any surface such as plants, rocks, docks, boats, pumping stations, etc. Zebra mussels pose both and environmental and economic threat as they will compete with native mussel species and clog the water intakes of power plants along with drinking water and irrigation systems."

“The flood maps are all wrong. The old water marks on grain elevators are meaningless. This was the message Washington University geology professor Bob Criss presented to a small room of environmentalists, water experts and river rats at Union Station just a few months before the December floodwater came to St. Louis... The frequency of major flooding events, in part due to climate change but greatly due to bad river management, are increasing . . . This is our fault . . . All these levees, Criss said, create a natural effect on the water, which has to go somewhere. ‘We have walled the rivers off and then the Army throws more rocks in it and we change its ability to respond,’ Criss said, talking mostly of the Missouri River, which is channelized for barge navigation that mostly doesn’t happen. “‘Any natural system, if you mess with it, it makes it more noisy,’ Criss said. ‘The big rivers have no place to go so, now they’re acting like small rivers.’”

“This species of sturgeon, which can grow to a length of six feet and weigh as much as 80 pounds, has managed to survive since the time of the dinosaurs, with fossils dating back some 70 million years. For all of the adaptations that have enabled this fish to have such a long run, however, the pallid sturgeon is in serious trouble . . . Despite government efforts to expand the population, only perhaps 200 or fewer wild-born pallid sturgeons are thought to inhabit one of its last strongholds — the Montana stretches of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers . . . Dams along the Missouri River have contributed to the sturgeon’s undoing, blocking spawning runs and altering hundreds of miles of river habitat . . . ”

"The roar of the Missouri flowing through the 14 floodgates spanning the shared Nebraska and South Dakota border was a hungry lion waiting to pounce. Soon the nation’s longest river would attack Nebraska with one of the worst floods in its history . . . Torrential rains in the upper Missouri River Basin in May 2011 stressed all five main stream dams upriver of Yankton’s Gavins Point, leaving the hydroelectric structure that backs up Lewis and Clark Lake as the last line of defense against downstream deluges . . . Devastation. That one word sums up the months-long Missouri River flood of 2011 for the people who experienced it . . ."

"Tyson Fresh Meats, the world’s largest beef and pork supplier, will pay $2 million for pumping animal waste into the Missouri River . . . Tyson discharges an average of 5 million gallons of treated wastewater from the facility into the river each day."

"According to the EPA, in 2007 the amount of pollution dumped into the Missouri River within the boundaries of our state totaled over 11,000 pounds."

“More than the river itself has changed. Along its banks, the ‘mighty forests of stately cottonwood’ painted by [George] Catlin are all but gone, their regenerative magic mostly lost. I have sought and enjoyed their shade, but today you are lucky to find a grove or a tree of the species that once spread out along the river’s banks, their unruly boughs indifferent to white men’s authority . . . For centuries, cottonwood trees sustained the Indians of the Missouri, offering them shelter, fuel, transport, ritual, and feed for the horses that sped them to the buffalo. Cotton- woods supplied Corps of Discovery with masts and dugout canoes. Cottonwoods fueled the steamboats that climbed the river and opened the west for settlement. Cottonwoods built river towns. In the floodplain where the cottonwoods stood, the backwaters and oxbows nurtured birds and fish. Now the floodplains are dried up and filled in, sprouting corn and beans on farms planted right up to the riverbanks. Gone, in consequence, is most of the wildlife that made Missouri country the American Serengeti.”

“The Missouri is like an artery system that carries the blood of the entire nation, and if we delay restoring it, we eventually will pay a high price . . . We grew up thinking it would last forever . . . Since Lewis and Clark’s day, the Missouri River has evolved into a major trout fishery, attracting people from all over the world . . . That trout has more value in the river than out of the river. Put it back in the river and you can keep catching it.

“In midwestern rivers now there are bighead carp, silver carp, and grass carp. Behind certain dams, these interlopers ‘stack up like cordwood,’ an Iowa state conservation official told me. They are unwanted intruders brought to the United States to devour weeds in catfish-farm ponds. But they escaped from their impoundments in Arkansas and probably elsewhere during floods and bred in the wild. And bred and bred. Now they are muscling native fish out of food and disrupting the lower third of the Missouri River’s already out-of-balance ecology.”

“In 2004, the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) implemented a habitat creation project on the Gavins Point Reach of the Missouri River (stretch of river immediately downriver from the Gavin's Point Dam) in an effort to promote recovery of piping plovers and the endangered least tern (Sternula antillarum).”