Dear readers,

Forum Communications Co. is pleased to present “Living with Water.” This five-part series focuses on water issues concerning the Northern Plains.

This series runs each Sunday through Feb. 26 in The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, the Grand Forks Herald, Jamestown Sun and Dickinson Press, all in North Dakota, The Daily Republic in Mitchell, S.D., and Detroit Lakes Newspapers in Minnesota. The company’s North Dakota broadcasting outlets in Fargo, Grand Forks, Minot and Bismarck will be involved in the series, and it will appear on our Internet platforms across the territory.

Last summer, Mike Jacobs, publisher and editor of the Grand Forks Herald, was selected as the project coordinator. He assembled a talented team of professionals from across our company, including reporters, photographers and production specialists from our newspapers, radio and television stations and our Internet sites to plan the series.

We also asked for public input via the Internet and email. We appreciate your comments, input and feedback.

I’m extremely proud of this project, which follows our award-winning series “Running with Oil,” presented in summer 2010. This first showcased our multimedia capabilities.

Newspapers are a perfect medium to report on issues such as water and oil. The ability to explain issues in print is distinct to newspapers and in-depth reporting is paramount to understanding this type of subject matter. In this case, Forum Communications is unique because of our capability to support the printed product with our broadcast and Internet offerings. Our company thus has an unusual ability and a responsibility to bring major issues before the public, and we take the challenge very seriously. I can assure you that our research and reporting is accurate and meets the high standard the company enjoys.

We welcome your comments, by email to mjacobs@gfherald.com, by U.S. mail to Living with Water, PO Box 6008, Grand Forks, ND 58206-6008 and online here at water.areavoices.com.

Thank you and please enjoy this series.

William C. Marcil, chairman, Forum Communications Co.

DEVILS LAKE, N.D. – With no furious flow or crashing waves, it is easy to be unaware of one of the state’s greatest water reservoirs.

Groundwater is one of North Dakota’s most valuable resources.

More than 60 percent of North Dakotans depend on groundwater for one purpose or another – municipal and rural water systems, irrigation, livestock and industrial purposes.

Water underlies land across the entire surface of North Dakota throughout 185 designated reserves, as well as some that have yet to be named.

“There are a lot of areas in the state that there is not a named aquifer, along some of the streams and rivers and things like that are unmapped and unnamed,” said Carl Anderson, state health department groundwater protection manager. “But they do provide water to wells that can be used by people.”

Any permeable geologic formation that contains and transmits groundwater is known as an aquifer. Some aquifers may be hundreds of square miles, such as the Spiritwood, which spans 1,800 square miles and is the largest unconsolidated aquifer in the state. Others are only a few hundred feet.

“They are highly variable,” North Dakota State Water Commission director of appropriations Bob Shaver said. “Some are so small we haven’t even identified them.”

Across the state, 178 communities with municipal distribution rely on groundwater for their supply, and 94 percent of incorporated communities get their resources from private wells, municipal distribution or rural systems.

The amount of water in the unconsolidated aquifers is about 60 million acre-feet, which dwarfs the state’s giant Missouri River reserve, Lake Sakakawea, which is estimated at about 24 million acre-feet, according to the NDSWC. (An acre-foot is equal to 325,851 gallons of water.)

Aquifers are commonly linear in shape with tributaries that resemble surface drainage systems.
Groundwater is found in two types of aquifers: unconsolidated, which is coarse silts and soils, and bedrock formations, which are less permeable and generally deeper in the ground.

Most unconsolidated aquifers are the result of glacial deposits and usually have better water.
“A lot of aquifers east of the Missouri River are glacial drift aquifers,” Anderson said. “They vary quite a bit in different water quality. Some of it is going to depend on the materials, where the well is screened and where the well draws water from.”

Irrigation makes up the majority of groundwater use at 95,000 acre-feet in 2010, which is more than 60 percent of groundwater used in the state, according to Mike Hove, senior water resource manager with NDSWC.

He said the percentages of consumption haven’t changed much over the years.

“The reality is, the numbers don’t change a whole lot, with the exception of industrial,” he said, comparing studies from 2003 to 2010. “You may see it fluctuate a few percentage points. You are not going to see big changes.”

In 2010, the state used about 145,000 acre-feet of groundwater, Hove said.

That’s about 47.2 billion gallons of water.

The U.S. Geological Survey keeps tabs on the water table levels, hydrologic technician Dennis Rosenkranz said. He said levels vary greatly across the state.

“Out in the Devils Lake region, the water is coming up with the rise of the lake; some are even coming above ground level,” he said. “In the western part of the state, it is pretty stable.”

There are about 3,900 wells around the state, Hove said. The state governs the use of water by the prior appropriations doctrine.

“It is essentially first come, first serve,” Hove said. “If there is a water management problem, where a resource is adversely affected, the junior appropriators would have to drop out.”

The largest growth has been in the industrial sector, more specifically the oil industry, Shaver said.

In 2003, industrial usage was just shy of 10,000 acre-feet, and in 2010, it was about 16,000, according to the NDSWC.

The need for water has increased due to the development of oil industry fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques, Shaver said.

However, using one of the state’s largest bedrock aquifers has allowed the industry to kill two birds with one stone, hydrogeologist and registered engineer Jon Patch said.

The Dakota aquifer serves as a source and a sink for water in the Oil Patch, he said. Water is pumped from the aquifer to pressurize oil reserves, and the waste brines can be injected back into the aquifer.

“It’s really kind of a perfect scenario,” Patch said, adding that Dakota water is very saline. “They inject water to the great depth (over 5,000 feet), and it is probably similar in quality to the water that is there naturally.”

The first water well drilled into the Dakota formation was near Ellendale in 1886.

Use of groundwater in western North Dakota has shifted to surface distribution because of continuing enhancement of the Southwest Water Pipeline, which draws water from Lake Sakakawea. This has caused a decline in groundwater use from farmsteads and small communities, Shaver said.

However, industrial use may be picking up the slack.

“It’s hard to predict,” Shaver said of future water use. “We try to look at that and stay ahead of the game, but some of it is so market driven and technology driven; you just don’t know what is lying out there that is going to be the next big change.”

Sean M. Soehren writes for the Dickinson (N.D.) Press

BRECKENRIDGE, Minn. – If you didn’t know the Red River was born here, you might well miss it. In midsummer, the confluence of the Otter Tail and Bois de Sioux rivers is a placid affair, wrapped around an equally placid park and threatening to no one. In the absence of their annual deluge of spring melt, the two rivers are so plodding that it is a wonder they manage to meet at all.

But meet they do and slowly but surely begin a long journey north.

The road map for that journey was laid out some 9,300 years ago by glacial Lake Agassiz. At various points, the lake covered the land stretching from the Red River Basin to Hudson Bay. As it retreated into Canada, it depressed the landscape just enough to give the river incentive to follow.

From a geological perspective, that timeframe makes the Red very young.

“Most rivers in the world, you measure their ages in millions of years,” said Don Schwert, a North Dakota State University geologist who has studied the Red River for more than three decades. “When the Red began to flow, man was probably already in North Dakota.”

The Red is far too young, in fact, to have carved out a true valley. Mature rivers cut their way across the land and forge reliable natural outlets for times of high water. The Red, Schwert said, “has struggled over its short life to carve a dynamic flood plain.”

So when the Red spills over – as flood-weary residents of the basin know well – it spills everywhere. In wet years, it sends residents up and down the region scrambling for countermeasures and praying for the best.

At its most destructive, it simply wipes the map clean: In 1826, a flood believed to be the worst in recorded history (perhaps 10 feet higher than the 1997 flood) effectively ended settlement near the Canadian border.

But such incidents belie a river that is meek by nature. From start to finish, its elevation falls just 233 feet over 545 miles. The slow, gentle decline makes for a weak flow. In some dry years, the Red stops running altogether, subjecting the region to a disaster on the opposite end of the spectrum: drought.

In spite of those extremes – drivers of no shortage of tension between the river and those who call its basin home – the river became a focal point for settlement because of its value as a transportation route.

“The only reason that Fargo and Moorhead are where they are is this happened to be the place where the railroad crossed the Red River,” said Mark Peihl, archivist for the Clay County Historical Society.

In the decade and a half between 1870 and 1885, the population of Clay County alone exploded from about 70 people to about 17,000 as the area boomed as a trade hub. Those early residents got a few rude welcomes, with a sizable flood in 1873 and another in 1897. The latter left 50,000 people homeless.

“Right from the get-go, they got a pretty good sense that the river has a potential to kick our butts,” Peihl said.

In those days, the river also suffered from an acute sanitation problem. It served as an outlet for the early sewer systems of the area, as well as a general dumping ground for waste.

“People saw the river as a water source, but also as a place to throw garbage,” Peihl said. “It is a bad combination.”

Predictably, water-borne illnesses ran rampant, and the river took on a reputation for being dirty that stuck around for decades after the fact (the namesake brownish-red coloring from clay soil particles didn’t help). When a severe drought struck in the 1930s, Peihl said, “it certainly gave people a sense of what the river could become: a fetid, stinking, open sewer.”

But as Peihl and others tell it, not even that unsavory situation ruined the area’s relationship with the Red. Indeed, until the middle of the 20th century, it was a thriving recreation spot for boating, fishing and swimming. Photos from those years depict bustling water parades, with spectators gathered on one bank and entertainment on the other.

Instead, the turning point came in 1944. That summer, five children drowned in the river. One was 12; the other four were 5 years old or younger.

“People in the community were absolutely horrified,” Peihl said. “They could’ve come away with a lesson – maybe, ‘Parents, watch your kids a little better.’ What they did is, basically they blamed the river.”

The next year, the Fargo and Moorhead Junior Chambers of Commerce went on a mission to improve river safety. That April, they awarded a $25 war bond to a 12-year-old Moorhead girl for winning a contest to coin a safety slogan. Her entry: “Taking chances doesn’t pay – The river is dangerous, night ’n day.”

Two hundred and fifty signs bearing the slogan were installed along the banks of the Red. Thousands of dollars went into summer programming at parks and schools designed to keep children on dry land, and dire warnings about the dangers of the river were issued early and often.

For generations, it worked. “Many people were told by their parents and grandparents, ‘Stay away from that river; it will kill you,’ ” said Bob Backman, executive director of River Keepers in Fargo. The nonprofit organization is dedicated to undoing decades of ill will toward the Red.

The installation of a series of low-head dams in the river compounded the Red’s deadly reputation. Built to retain water in times of drought, the dams also produced powerful pockets of current that served as prime traps for drownings.

Most of the dams have since been retrofitted to eliminate the problem, and the last two are slated for overhauls as soon as water levels allow. Even though the phenomenon was limited to the dams, the notion of the river dragging down hapless swimmers stuck around.

“The word ‘undertow’ became used a lot in our community,” Backman said. “We still get questions from people asking us about the dangerous undertows in the river.”

His group, founded two decades ago, has worked diligently to use outreach and education programs to repair the river’s reputation. Backman hopes to restore the Red to its former glory as a recreation resource.

To an extent, it’s working. Efforts like a cleanup program, a fishing clinic, boat rentals and tours have helped spur a detente between the public and the river. River Keepers led the way in getting the Red declared an official boating and canoe route.

But in recent years, the river has reminded residents of the hazards of getting too close.

When a wet fall and a wet winter turn into a wet spring, the plodding, lazy headwaters of Wahpeton, N.D., and Breckenridge become restless. The ice sheets, in much the fashion of Lake Agassiz thousands of years earlier, melt from south to north.

And the Red, in lieu of a mature floodplain to relieve the burden, looks for another way out.

Marino Eccher writes for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead

The Sheyenne River has etched its identity on North Dakota’s landscape across several millennia.
It has been a torrential surge, boring into the earth, feeding on rain and snow. Or a quivering trickle, thirsting amid a deserted riverbed.

These days, the state of the Sheyenne is akin to most other North Dakota waterways: too much water for far too long.

Much like the Red River Valley, the Sheyenne Basin was defined over centuries from advancing and retreating glaciers that once buried modern-day North Dakota under several thousand feet of ice.
Much of the evidence from those prehistoric days is still visible in the Sheyenne valley, as retired University of North Dakota English professor Robert King discovered when he traversed the river seven years ago.

In the opening pages of “Stepping Twice Into The River,” King chronicles the “swells and hollows” whittled by the giant ice sheets, and the gouged valleys of the Sheyenne formed by glacial floods, which flowed with the force of 3 million cubic feet per second.

“It was not a wilderness, of course, but it seemed a wilderness,” King wrote of the upper Sheyenne valley, “the relic of an un-imaginable event that had happened and disappeared and left its mark.”
The Sheyenne River at 591 miles is the longest waterway wholly contained within North Dakota’s borders. It is an enigma among its peers in that it has no definite starting point.

The river’s origin lies about 180 miles northwest of Fargo in a sparsely populated area of north-central North Dakota.

West of Sheyenne Lake, about 10 miles north of McClusky, pockets of wetlands congregate amid monotonous farmland. Sheyenne Lake is isolated and hidden by the surrounding hills. Its waters are tame yet menacing – foreshadowing the power the river inflicts on communities hundreds of miles downstream.

When water levels are high – as they always seem to be recently – the single-lane gravel road separating Sheyenne Lake and its eastern sister, Coal Mine Lake, disappears beneath a few inches of floodwater.

From that lonely rural respite, the Sheyenne River blazes a tangled trail. It juts northeast, skirting south of Devils Lake, before diving south past Cooperstown. Several miles north of Valley City, the Sheyenne hits a man-made obstacle, where the waters are funneled through Lake Ashtabula and Baldhill Dam.

Completed in 1950, the dam was intended to store water that eastern North Dakota communities – mainly Fargo – could tap into in times of drought.

But for at least a generation, the dam has functioned more for flood control, helping to hold back higher flows during a climactic wet period.

South of the dam, the Sheyenne continues its weaving path, seemingly more threatening now to more-populated riverside communities. It flows south and southeast through Valley City, Kathryn, Fort Ransom and Lisbon. That 63-mile stretch, in particular, is home to a national scenic byway, guiding travelers over mostly gravel roads along the river’s picturesque banks.

With one final switch east of Lisbon, the river bends back north into Cass County – visiting Kindred, Horace, West Fargo and Harwood before emptying into the Red River north of Fargo.

In all, the Sheyenne River Basin draws from more than 7,100 square miles of drainage area across eastern North Dakota. That acreage is separate from the land that drains into other nearby waterways, namely Devils Lake. Runoff from the surrounding land flows into either the Sheyenne or Devils Lake, never both.

Nature would keep the two bodies of water separate under normal circumstances, but their fates have become intertwined because of a man-made outlet built to release water into the Sheyenne and control the bulging level of Devils Lake.

Not so many decades ago, the Sheyenne River was docile – nowhere near the flows it carries these days. The erratic changes have forced people along the river to face difficult decisions they never knew they’d have to make.

Some, like Scott Sand, have seen their farms invaded by floodwaters as the Sheyenne dredges new paths through the ancient valley.

About two miles south of Pekin, N.D., Sand’s family has lived and farmed along the river for at least two generations.

When his mother grew up on that same land, the Sheyenne was tiny enough to walk across.
But as of last summer, the river spread as wide as 40 feet across – slicing an altered course that threatens the Sands’ farmhouse during spring melts.

“It’s a very scary situation for us right now,” Sand said, echoing a sentiment countless other families share downstream.

Aside from the routine floods these residents have faced for several consecutive springs, a greater fear lingers on the horizon.

None dispute Devils Lake’s high levels need to fall – but there’s passionate, and at times bitter, disagreement over how that ought to be accomplished.

Many residents in the southern Sheyenne Basin – particularly in Valley City – worry about the North Dakota Water Commission’s steps to increase out-flows from the lake into the Sheyenne.

Experts and scientists are concerned about environmental impact; farmers fear for their livelihoods; residents weigh whether to pick up and move altogether.

“People like to come here because it’s beautiful, it’s scenic, the river’s alive,” longtime Valley City resident Madeline Luke said.

Luke, 59, lives a block from the Sheyenne and has watched many of her neighbors leave rather than continue the perpetual flood fight.

“We’re dead in the water here, so to speak,” she said.

Kristen M. Daum reports for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead

MITCHELL, S.D. – It’s peculiar how chance and a quick decision can affect thousands of people far into the future.

Such may have been the case with the city of Mitchell and its dry perch atop the bluffs of the James River Valley – at least according to legend.

It was 140 years ago when a pioneer named Heman Cady Greene traveled up the James from somewhere near its terminus at the Missouri River. He stopped at the confluence of the James and Firesteel Creek, a distance of about 65 miles as the crow flies, and far more as the river bends.

The trip would have been a long and winding one among gently rolling bluffs and flat prairie, with grass arching up high in all directions. I’ve never found a source that could tell me if Greene traveled overland or by boat, but if he was in a boat, the arduousness of the journey would have been mitigated by the calm of the James, which can be as easy to paddle upstream as it is to float downriver.

The gentleness of the river’s current derives from the near flatness of its valley, much of which was once an enormous, post-glacial lake. The river’s broader basin encompasses 22,000 square miles, including 14,000 in eastern South Dakota and 8,000 in southeastern North Dakota.

The river’s elevation falls only 130 feet over the course of 474 miles from its beginning near Fessenden, N.D., until it empties into the Missouri near Yankton, which equates to a drop of about
3 inches per mile. At normal rates of flow, according to a 1983 U.S. Geological Survey report on the river, it would take an object dropped in the river about a month to float through South Dakota.

So flat is the James in some stretches that high inflows from tributaries can actually cause the river to back up. In 1969, for example, heavy inflows from the Elm River in northern South Dakota caused the James to flow backward for nine days.

The James has been informally dubbed “the longest unnavigable river in the world.” Some sources indicate the distinction comes from the translation of the Sioux name for the river, “E-ta-zi-po-ka-se Wakpa,” meaning “unnavigable river,” but I’ve always assumed it came from early European settlers who viewed the river during an average-to-dry year and deemed it too narrow and shallow for riverboats.

Whatever the origin, records tell us there have been plenty of years when the river was a trickling stream of a few feet in depth. John Paul Gries apparently had such years in mind when he crafted this artful put-down of the James in his 1996 book “Roadside Geology of South Dakota”:
“Now we have a puny stream, wildly meandering, lost in the broad floor of the James River valley.”
Neither the “puny” nor the “unnavigable” label has been true of late, especially in the Mitchell area, where the flooded river has reached the decidedly un-puny and very navigable record depth of 25.33 feet.

Whatever shape the river was in when Heman Cady Greene traveled it, he apparently liked what he saw there at its meeting with Firesteel Creek. He staked a claim and lived briefly in a dugout on a creek bluff, and soon built a house and moved in with his family. Other homesteaders arrived, and a village called Firesteel sprang up. In the coming decades, as part of the Great Dakota Boom, the area around Firesteel filled up with farms and towns.

Historians tell us the settlers of Firesteel probably hoped to capitalize on the advance of the railroad, which was headed straight toward them from the east. The late, great South Dakota writer Bob Karolevitz tells us in his book “An Historic Sampler of Davison County” that a chance occurrence during the railroad’s advance set Firesteel down the path to oblivion.

“… A railroad surveyor supposedly saw a piece of driftwood either lodged in a tree or lying on high ground along the creek,” Karolevitz writes. “According to local legend, that was indication to him that the village was in a floodplain and therefore not suitable for permanent development.”

I should point out that James McLaird, a historian and professor emeritus at Mitchell’s Dakota Wesleyan University, pooh-poohs the legend.

“Quite often there would be a little town founded with people trying to get ahead of the railroad and get ahead of the game,” he told me during Mitchell’s 125th anniversary year in 2006. “The railroad would usually pass them by and set up a town about two miles away. You find that repeatedly, so I’m very suspicious of whether (the driftwood story) happened in Firesteel.”

Perhaps the story was concocted by Greene and other leaders of Firesteel to explain to fellow residents why a faraway, wealthy railroad baron, instead of the townspeople themselves, had come to select and control the land where the new city of Mitchell would take root, up on the bluffs about three miles to the west.

We can deduce from George Washington Kingsbury’s “History of Dakota Territory” that such an explanation may have been needed to placate the people of Firesteel, who were so destitute around 1875 as to require the formation of a relief association.

“It was estimated that twenty families were suffering for food, fuel and clothing; and that seed grain for at least five hundred acres would have to be provided,” Kingsbury reported.

Whatever the reasons, Firesteel soon died and Mitchell was born. It’s a good thing it happened that way, because the Firesteel site has been under water an awful lot in modern times. These last two years especially, the city of Firesteel would have been submerged by floodwater.

As it is, the city of Mitchell is high and dry, even when the James reaches record depths. Some rural roads wash out, a few low-lying residences are inundated and fields and pastures are swamped, but a James River flood is more of an annoyance to Mitchell residents than a catastrophe. For those relatively few people who live and farm along the river in the Mitchell area, recent years have been a trying time as floods have become more frequent.

At other locations along the James, the situation is more akin to dire. Jamestown, N.D., like Mitchell, has its roots near the confluence of two waterways – in Jamestown’s case, it’s the James River and Pipestem Creek. I don’t know the history of Jamestown, but maps show the confluence of those waterways is still within the city limits.

Both waterways are dammed above the city, but this past spring and summer, water was present in historic quantities throughout the James and Missouri river basins. Historic releases totaling nearly 277 billion gallons were sent rushing through Jamestown, sending city officials scurrying to place thousands of sandbags and inciting all manner of griping about the government officials who control the releases.

Five years ago, I visited the old Firesteel site with the old farmer who owns it. It’s quite obvious to the modern eye, even in dry years, that the site is part of a floodplain. After all, rivers in valleys sometimes fill up those valleys, don’t they? It makes me wonder what those early settlers were thinking.

Perhaps they never planned to stay and were only waiting for the railroad, hoping to strike it rich and move on, never giving a thought to the future water-related consequences of the town site.
Still, I can’t help but wonder if the legend of the driftwood is true, and if that chance occurrence and resulting decision are the only reasons we weren’t filling sandbags this summer in Firesteel rather than watching the flood from on high in Mitchell.

I also wonder about the flood-related decisions being made these days, and what consequences those decisions might send tumbling into the future.

Seth Tupper is editor of The Daily Republic in Mitchell, S.D.

_

Power, barges, irrigation, recreation among contentious issues

BISMARCK – Chuck Gerhart suspected a few surprises lay ahead on a trip floating down the Mighty Missouri aboard a paddlewheel riverboat.

He’d soon learn, yet again, that the Missouri River can fool even a veteran who knows its currents well.

Gerhart’s boat was the Far West II, a replica of a famous steamboat by that name that ventured the upper Missouri in the 1870s, when riverboats were the primary means of transportation before the railroad.

As Gerhart left the dock, with 30 or 40 passengers on board, he eased the Far West into the current that would carry the boat more than 200 miles downriver.

But the journey would be on a Missouri River radically different than the days of routine riverboat traffic. Gerhart’s departure and destination points were dictated by two mammoth dams, Garrison and Oahe, that now regulate the river’s flows.

The Far West could only go so far on the modern Missouri.

Once the boat had traveled 20 miles downriver, it encountered the headwaters of Lake Oahe – and ran aground on a sandbar.

The new Far West, like the original, was designed to travel in shallow water; it drew no more than 4 feet. But that proved not shallow enough.

“We had problems just like the 1880s,” Gerhart, 71, said of the trip he took, near as he and friends can recall, in the late 1980s. “When you slide on a sandbar going downstream, you’re in trouble.”

Showdown in Omaha

The country delivered a defiant message to the Missouri River in 1943: No more.
The nation would no longer tolerate the river’s frequent rampages that spawned widespread floods that devastated cities and swamped crops.

The river’s destructive unruliness determined its own fate that year by inspiring the Flood Control Act of 1944, which would forever change the Missouri River.

On April 3, 1943, the Missouri at Bismarck did what it had done countless times before. It burst its banks after a huge ice jam formed, flooding thousands of acres with a wall of water.

The river, clogged with huge cakes of ice that hammered the Memorial Bridge, causing it to shudder, crested at 21.86 feet, almost 6 feet above flood stage in Bismarck.

Mandan, also battling the raging Heart River, saw its business district inundated and almost half the town’s residents had to flee to higher ground.

Similar scenes of devastation played out along the Missouri’s banks for more than 1,000 miles through the nation’s heartland. Damages were tallied at $20 million, the equivalent of $43 million in current dollars, and 1.8 million acres were inundated.

Officials gathered in Omaha, Neb., where the city’s airport had been flooded, and solemnly vowed to take action.

Levees wouldn’t do the job, Army engineers announced. Taming the Missouri would require a series of six huge dams and reservoirs – immense pools to hold back water to be released in flows regulated by gigantic gates.

Work on Garrison Dam, 75 miles upstream from Bismarck, began in 1947. Six years later, in 1953, the earthen dam was closed, allowing its reservoir, Lake Sakakawea, to begin filling with water.

But the petulant Missouri River would not wait for the dam to be finished. It would flood again five times after 1943 – in 1944, 1947, 1949, 1951 and, most notably, in 1952.

That year, in another ice-jam flood, the Missouri surged to 27.9 feet, almost 12 feet above flood stage in Bismarck.

The 1952 flood, considered the worst in 42 years, drove 1,000 Bismarck residents from their homes and inundated 300 houses, sweeping at least one away.

As the water receded, an official with the Army Corps of Engineers gave reassurances. The big dams then under construction offered the only protection against such major floods, said Lt. Col. R.J.B. Page, the Garrison district engineer.

“The Oahe Dam will, of course, stop flooding at Pierre and Fort Pierre completely,” Page said, referring to South Dakota, “and the Garrison Dam, after its closure in the summer of 1953, will do the same for Bismarck.”

Devastating floods would become a relic of the past, thanks to the massive dams. As well as providing flood control, the dams and reservoirs would generate huge amounts of hydropower, help supply municipal and industrial water, irrigation, and support barge traffic downstream on the lower Missouri River.

But the dams also would transform the Missouri into one of the nation’s most altered rivers.
In North Dakota, all but 70 or 80 of the Missouri River’s 410 miles flow through a channel; the rest flow through artificial reservoirs.

The most natural stretch of the river is near Williston, below where the Yellowstone merges with the Missouri, says Greg Power, a biologist and chief of fisheries for the North Dakota Game and Fish Department.

The reach above Garrison Dam near Williston still has sturgeon, for instance, a fish species that has disappeared from most places. “It’s quasi-natural,” Power says.

Of sturgeon and erosion

It was no coincidence that the Far West was stranded on a sandbar at the headwaters of Lake Oahe.
Along the headwaters, where the river widens as the lake begins, the river’s pace slows, allowing sediment carried in the water to settle on the bottom, where it accumulates over time, forming deltas and sandbars.

Siltation, as the effect is called, is a major problem on the Missouri River. Sediment buildup plagues the river cities of Williston and Bismarck-Mandan.

The formation of a delta south of Bismarck was one factor in the formation of an ice jam in 2009, which briefly caused flooding before dynamite helped break it up.

Sandbars are a natural part of the Missouri River. In fact, management of the dams was altered in 2004 in a manner to promote more sandbar formation, providing valuable nesting habitat for endangered bird species.

Dozens of species, including sport fish and game birds, were declining along the river, according to American Rivers, an environmental advocacy group that proclaimed the Missouri the nation’s most endangered river in 2002.

That was two years after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a biological opinion that required the Army Corps of Engineers to manage the dams to recreate the river’s seasonal fluctuations.

The altered operating manual for the dams followed years of studies and criticism from environmentalists calling for regulating the Missouri River in a way that more closely mimicked natural seasonal rhythms.

Every year the heavy flows from spring melt, with water flowing from the mountains and plains, would flush the river and rearrange its elaborate mix of sandbars and islands.

Then, when flows would recede in the dry summer, the sandbars would be exposed, allowing bird species like the least tern and piping plover to build nests.

Releases from the dams are kept relatively stable to provide hydropower and reliable flows to operate barges on the lower river, as well as minimize riverbank erosion.

The operation of the dams was further modified in 2006 to provide for a “spring pulse,” a surge of water that helps rare sturgeon spawn.

The fluctuating river levels are good for birds and fish, but exacerbate bank erosion – a point of contention among landowners and communities along the river in North Dakota that deal with loss of land and flooding aggravated by deltas.

That is just one of the ongoing controversies involved in the balancing acts required to operate the Missouri River dams in a way that serves multiple uses.

During periods of drought, including much of the late 1990s and early 2000s, upstream recreation interests clashed with the downstream barge industry over how much water to release from the dams.

North Dakota officials clamored for more water to be stored in the Sakakawea and Oahe reservoirs during times of drought so fishing and other water recreation industries could remain viable.

Recreation revenues, they pointed out, dwarf the downstream barge industry by a factor of 9 to 1, according to corps figures.

The argument ultimately was taken into account in the 2004 revised master manual for operating the dams, allowing for greater water storage during droughts.

But conditions can change dramatically in only a few years – as shown by the historic Missouri River flood of 2011, which came only a few years after a prolonged drought.

So while coping with flooding that lasted three months in Bismarck-Mandan and elsewhere along the Missouri, officials found themselves criticizing the corps for failing to anticipate the possibility of heavy spring rains following a heavy mountain snowpack.

Thus, the critics were saying the corps should have begun releasing more water sooner – the opposite argument they had made just a year earlier when, mindful of recent severe droughts, they called for storing more water.

Todd Sando, North Dakota’s state engineer, acknowledges that operating the dams calls for delicate balancing acts. Hydropower, by far the biggest economic benefit, requires storing enough water to run the generating turbines, for instance.

“You need head to produce the energy,” Sando says. “You can’t have dry dams. Hydropower is the moneymaker.”

The ongoing tug-of-war between clashing interests, as well as upstream states and downstream states, reflects the inherent contradictions in running dams that must balance eight authorized uses as diverse as irrigation and hydropower.

The Flood Control Act of 1944 was a compromise that melded two competing plans from rival bureaucracies.

The Army Corps of Engineers pushed the Pick plan, which emphasized flood control and navigation. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Reclamation’s Sloan plan favored irrigation, municipal and industrial water development projects.

Washington merged the blueprints into the Pick-Sloan Plan, which authorized eight uses for the yet-to-be-built Missouri River dams.

“Congress forced kind of a shotgun marriage and ended up with the system we have today,” says Lee Klaprodt, director of planning for the North Dakota State Water Commission.

The only issue upstream and downstream politicians can agree upon in managing the complex Missouri River dam system, it seems, is the critical need for effective flood control.

Steam boatin’ by moonlight

Finally, after half a day of rocking back and forth, and using the paddlewheels to wash away part of the sandbar, the Far West broke free and resumed its journey down the Missouri River.

Gerhart had to make up for lost time. A reception was planned for the Far West’s arrival on the lake above the Oahe Dam, where the boat’s owners and others would be waiting.

“We had to travel all day and most of the night just to get to Mobridge,” Gerhart says.

Traveling in the dark of night was more treacherous. A pair of spotters on the bow helped Gerhart keep a lookout for hazards, including snags, fallen trees embedded in the sand that sunk many an old wood-hulled riverboat.

“If you have a full moon, that is much better,” says Gerhart, who has 50 years of boating experience on the Missouri. “We were very lucky.”

The boat, designed for brief pleasure rides, was equipped with a bar and snack area, but no sleeping accommodations. Passengers had to sleep on the deck, using life vests as pillows.

Unlike the riverboat captains of old, Gerhart had a depth finder to help him stay in the river’s channel. Although helpful, the finder could only read the river bottom below, but not out ahead.

Once the Far West reached the open waters of Lake Oahe, however, the traveling became easier, largely free of the obstacles including snags and numerous sandbars that plagued the Missouri before the dams.

On today’s river, the greatest hazard to boaters often is posed by other boaters, moving at speeds far greater than the tortoise pace of the Far West’s paddlewheels, with an average speed of 4 or 5 mph.

Eventually, after 2½ days, the Far West put ashore above the Oahe Dam, a few miles north of Pierre, S.D. A crowd and a band were waiting.

Many of the passengers decided they’d had enough of riverboat travel, and elected not to make the return journey onboard the Far West.

The roundtrip voyage was in all likelihood the first long paddlewheel riverboat trip on the Upper Missouri since the steamboats stopped running in the 1880s, after the arrival of the railroads.
On the trip home, going against the current, it took a whole day to travel the last 20 miles.
“It was an adventure,” Gerhart says. “I got to experience a little bit of what it was like in the 1800s.”

Patrick Springer reports for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead

James has a reputation as an unusual river

MITCHELL, S.D. – The James River has been a companion to Don and Donna McLean of rural Mitchell for decades.

They have watched the James rise and cover cropland, and the river has provided for them in times of drought when other farmers couldn’t grow much of a crop. The “Jim,” as some locals call it, has provided a place to fish and hunt, to boat and swim, and offered magnificent views and pleasant times.

A river has ups and downs, and so does living alongside it. The McLeans, retired now and enjoying life by their river, are glad to live exactly where they do.

The James River winds 710 miles and stretches from Wells County, N.D., through eastern South Dakota before it drains into the Missouri River southeast of Yankton.

The river flows through and past small towns and cities, including Jamestown, N.D., Huron, S.D., and Mitchell. It is dammed in several areas for recreational purposes and to ensure community water supplies.

After decades of being a slow, low river, it has hit much higher levels since 1997, when flooding sparked by heavy winter snow and a sudden spring poured water through the region.

That’s when the McLeans, both 76, started to notice a difference in their land.

Don McLean was a high school history teacher and three-sport coach and referee for more than 40 years. He and his wife moved a house to a rise near the James River shortly after he started teaching. They raised three daughters while McLean “did a little farming” to supplement his teacher’s salary.

He grew alfalfa and grass hay and raised cattle, all alongside the James.

When they bought their more than 400 acres along the river, they were assured the river wouldn’t be a problem. Nowadays, attitudes are different.

“People say to us, ‘Who buys land there? You know it’s going to flood part of the time,’ ” McLean said. “When we started we were told, ‘You’ll get a hay crop every year.’

“Well, it’s changed over the years. And that started in 1997.”

National Weather Service hydrologist Mike Gillispie, based in Sioux Falls, says the record backs the McLeans up.

The James River flows just east of Mitchell. Flood stage is 17 feet. The five highest crests at that stage have all been since 1997, according to NWS records. The two highest measurements were both in 2011 – 25.33 feet on April 11 and 25.14 feet on March 26.

Gillispie said the James has a well-deserved reputation for being an unusual body of water. It’s known as the world’s longest un-navigable river.

Gillispie said the river is nearly flat, falling only about a half-foot per mile as it winds through South Dakota.

“I do know it is one of the flattest rivers, at least in the United States,” he said. “That’s why when it floods, it stays flooded for a long time.”

That flooding has been a concern in recent years.

Walter “Sonny” Morrison has lived in the same house near the James all 73 years of his life. He still farms on land next to the land his two daughters work.

Some of his land is under water now, and other land is surrounded by water, and he can no longer plant wheat or harvest hay from it.

Morrison said he wonders why the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers doesn’t release more water in the winter, especially in recent years with heavy snow. The water would move through the river and empty into the Missouri River at a better rate, he said.

Instead, the water is released in the spring, causing a great deal of flooding. Morrison said he doesn’t recall flooding being a major concern for most of his life, but in the past four or five years, it’s become standard.

Again, NWS records bear that out.

In 1968, the high-water mark for the year was 5.28 feet. In 1970, it was 9.33 feet.

That changed in the mid-1990s, and by 2010, highs in the 20-foot range were regular events.

“A new river channel cut off a point of land I have,” Morrison said. “I lost 22 acres.”

Some land has been covered by water and other land has become so wet it is useless for farming or raising hay.

Don McLean said a neighbor used to grow some of the best soybeans around, with top yield.
“That tells you a little bit about some of the potential for agriculture,” he said.

Flooding also sends large trees and other debris down the river, blocking the water flow and causing other problems.

“It is costly for all the farmers up and down the river,” McLean said.

Patty Morrison, 41, who farms on land next to her parents, said she has also lost land to rising water. Because much of it is hay land, she cannot get crop insurance to cover the loss, since hay isn’t considered a crop, no matter how valuable it becomes.

If the land is flooded for three years in a row, obtaining crop insurance is impossible. Renting the land is also a major challenge, she said.

Despite water covering once-farmable land, their property taxes don’t fall appreciably, the farmers said. Sonny Morrison smiled wryly as he said his tax bill dropped $4 annually.

It’s not just the decisions of the Corps of Engineers that plague the farmers along the southern end of the James, the Morrisons said.

Farmers on extremely flat land in northeastern South Dakota are increasingly tiling their land, a form of drainage that propels water into ditches and, eventually, the James River. That water flows south and a lot of it ends up widening the James, according to farmers downstream.

The Morrisons and McLean have suggestions to alleviate the problem.

They would like to see more culverts installed to move water along. Currently, the water level is often at least 2 feet higher on the north side of roads, which often act as mini-dams, Sonny Morrison said.

Lower roads, the kind he recalls from his youth, might also help, he said. The water could pass over them and move along quickly.

Politicians have taken an interest in the James at various times.

In 2009, then-South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack signed an agreement intended to improve water quality, reduce soil erosion, aid flood control and enhance wildlife habitat in the state’s James River Watershed.

“The USDA is proud to collaborate with South Dakota to protect and conserve our natural resources while improving the quality of life in our communities,” Vilsack said then.

The goal of South Dakota’s Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program is to enroll up to 100,000 acres of eligible agricultural land located in the James River Watershed. Landowners in the program retire environmentally sensitive land from production agriculture in return for government payments, and the land is planted with natural vegetation that, among other things, filters runoff before it enters the James.

The Morrisons and McLeans have examined their options but aren’t ready to sign up for government programs. The Morrisons are farmers by upbringing and practice, and they will continue to work their land, come high water or anything else.

The McLeans rent their land and are satisfied with the money they receive. They’re also leery of restrictions that may be placed on them if they sign up for a government program.

Still, living along the river has been a positive, they all said.

When the McLeans came to their property, there was one tree. Don McLean planted hundreds, and now their home, with a dazzling view of the James, is surrounded by trees. Their kids and grandkids love to come to their house for holidays.

Deer are regular visitors, as are would-be hunters who want a shot at the McLeans’ four-legged residents. Pheasants and wild turkey bustle about and smaller birds swoop past, singing songs that fill the trees McLean planted decades ago.

The river is also a source of recreation.

“Had a lot of fun in the river growing up,” Patty Morrison said. “Dad taught us to swim down there.”
She said she fished, boated and swam in the river for years. Bullheads were once plentiful and easy to catch, but now they have been replaced by larger species such as catfish and the occasional northern pike.

City folks are a nuisance, drawn to the river to hunt, fish and otherwise recreate, the McLeans and Morrisons said. They often leave garbage and other messes behind.

More and more of those city people are moving to houses on bluffs overlooking the river. The Morrisons and McLeans don’t blame them, since they, too, appreciate the beauty of the river. It’s just another way their lives have changed in recent years.

The river can also serve as a dangerous place, as cars slide into it at times and people dive into or swim in areas they probably shouldn’t. In 2010, a man being chased by Mitchell police dove into the water when it was at near-record stage and drowned. His body wasn’t found for several weeks.
“That was kind of eerie,” Donna McLean said.

The roads can be tricky in the winter, when snow blocks them, and in the spring, when water flows over them.

Don McLean recalls having to park his car a half-mile from his house and walk home late at night after officiating a game. It was a pleasant walk, he said with a smile.

Sometimes in the spring, they have to drive all the way to Alexandria to circle around and get into Mitchell. The McLeans live 3.5 miles from Mitchell, but when the James decides to close a road or two, it can be a 35-mile round trip to get home.

There have been challenges, they agree, but they also wouldn’t change a thing.
“From a housewife’s view, I’d say it’s not easy,” Donna McLean said. “But it’s the best place to live.”

Tom Lawrence reports for The Daily Republic of Mitchell, S.D.

The mighty Missouri River begins with the humble snowflakes that drape the jagged peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains in Wyoming and Montana.

Runoff from melting mountain snowpack forms the Three Forks, a trio of rivers that converge on a low plain in Montana to form the headwaters of the Missouri.

The river winds its way to the north and east, gathering flows from more melted snowpack from mountain ranges and high plains.

The Missouri gets a big boost near Williston, N.D., when it meets the 678-mile Yellowstone River, its greatest tributary, whose last 18 miles flow through North Dakota.

Not far below Williston, the Missouri widens into Lake Sakakawea – the reservoir created by Garrison Dam. Under normal conditions, it holds enough water to cover all of North Dakota to a depth of 6 inches.
The water in the lake comes from a drainage area of 181,400 square miles, an area larger than the state of California.

Below Garrison Dam, the Missouri flows in its channel through the heart of the state, including Bismarck-Mandan, until it encounters the headwaters of Lake Oahe, the reservoir of the Oahe Dam, near Pierre, S.D.

Garrison and Oahe are two of the six earthen dams on the upper and central Missouri. Collectively, the chain of reservoirs holds enough water to store more than a year of the river’s flows.

By the time the Missouri exits North Dakota, it has flowed 410 miles, draining 34,000 square miles, or almost half of the state. But the river still has most of its journey before it.

By the time the Missouri ends at St. Louis, where it joins the Mississippi River after running through the country’s heartland, it has traveled 2,341 miles.

That’s actually 205 miles shorter than its measured length in the late 1800s, the result of channels built to remove meanders in the lower river to aid barge traffic between Sioux City, Iowa, and St. Louis.

The Missouri River is the country’s longest river. Its basin – 530,000 square miles – takes in about one-sixth of the continental United States.

Its dams, reservoirs, channels and levees make it one of the nation’s most altered rivers. Some call it America’s greatest river.

Patrick Springer – Forum Communications Co.

RURAL VELVA, N.D. – The farmstead where Marvin Jensen’s grandparents raised him lies next to the Souris River. There, he has witnessed the worst flood and the worst drought ever recorded in the river valley.

The worst drought was in effect when he was born 75 years ago in the depths of the Great Depression.
The worst flood happened this past summer.

On the side of Jensen’s house, a muddy line shows where the water lapped under his windows. A month into flood cleanup, there were still big pools in the yard where tiny fish swam in the sunlight.

In all the floods that came before, the water never reached his grandparents’ old home, he said. When he built a new house 15 years ago, he made the foundation 10 inches higher than his grandparents’ just in case.

“But I should’ve had another foot higher,” he said with a weak laugh.

Still, he won’t leave the farmstead, where he said trees muffle the winter storms and wild game crowd the fields.

“That’s where I came into the world, and that where I’m going to leave it,” he said.

In a nutshell, that’s been the struggle with water in the Souris River Valley – not to mention the rest of the state – when there is often too much or too little water and never just enough.

Planning doesn’t always help, as valley communities discovered last summer. In nearby Minot, the state’s fourth-largest city and one of its fastest growing, 4,100 homes and businesses were flooded, many built by the river under the assumption that upstream dams would protect them.

Traumatic birth

It was a catastrophic flood that gave birth to the Souris River 11,500 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age.

According to a widely accepted theory by former University of North Dakota geologist Alan Kehew, an ice dam containing a vast lake in southern Saskatchewan broke. The water carved a path down through Minot, then Velva, eventually making its way back north into Manitoba, where it joined the waters of ancient Lake Agassiz, the precursor to the Red River Valley.

In some places, such as the rolling terrain of the Towner area downstream of Velva, the ancient flood spilled out across a large area. In other places, its fury was concentrated.

A person floating in the middle of the Souris in Minot may look up and see steep hills that are, in fact, the edge of the surrounding plateau 60 yards or so above the river. In its wild youth, the Souris had once scoured the top of those hills.

Today, the Souris, also known as the Mouse River (“souris” means “mouse” in French), is often as meek as its namesake. There is no lake threatening to inundate the valley, and the climate in the rain shadow of the Rockies or close to it is relatively dry. Still, it’s a very small river that drains an area a third the size of North Dakota.

When a lot of snow or rain falls, all that extra water will follow the river’s ancient path, and that’s where people now live, according to Steve Buan, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service office charged with forecasting river levels in the Souris Valley. “We humans, we’ve occupied that space, and Mother Nature wants it.”

Battling nature

The first major water project in the Souris River Valley was completed the same year Marvin Jensen was born.

The drought of the 1930s had been disastrous not just to farmers but to waterfowl, which had become a symbol for the conservation movement, according to Kelley Hogan, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife official.

Using duck stamps, still sold to duck hunters today, conservationists established a system of reservoirs to preserve wetlands, including the Upper Souris National Wildlife Refuge he oversees.

In 1936, the federal government built Lake Darling Dam just upstream of Minot as part of that refuge.
Fifty years later, Congress authorized another water supply project, a pipeline bringing water from the Missouri River. Construction began in 2002.

After Lake Darling Dam was built, major floods in 1969 and 1976 shifted attention to flood control. The first effort, to create a supersized version of the Lake Darling Dam called the Burlington Dam, was to protect the valley from a 500-year flood. It met stiff opposition from landowners fearing loss of land and conservationists fearing loss of wildlife habitat.

The compromise was the construction of new dams upstream in Saskatchewan near the towns of Estevan and Alameda, and a slight upgrade of the Lake Darling Dam. Canadians wanted their dams for power generation and for water storage – they too feared a drought – and the U.S. piggybacked on the two projects. The first dam was finished in 1991 and the other in 1995, respectively. The Lake Darling Dam upgrade was finished in 1998. The system was designed to protect against a 100-year flood.
In the years that followed, there were some floods, but none that really put the system to the test. That test came this past summer, and it swamped the system, damaging more than 4,500 homes and businesses in Minot alone.

Orlin Backes led the effort to win support for the Burlington Dam, but when it proved fruitless, he agreed to the compromise. Critics had said the Burlington Dam was unnecessarily big, he said. “I guess we bought into it. We thought a 100-year would take care of it, but we were wrong.”
He recalled ruefully how happy he was when flood insurance requirements for homes in the valley were lifted.

The end of those requirements encouraged more residents and businesses to move down into the valley.

Fickle water

Nobody knows how rare a flood like the flood of 2011 might be or how rare a drought like that of the Depression era. Put another way, nobody knows the risk of such events.

Records and observations in the Souris Valley go back only as far as the turn of the 20th century, making any prediction a matter of debate, according to Gregg Wiche, director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Bismarck office. The last record flood in the Minot area, in 1881, was very early in the history of European settlement, and, to his knowledge, there is no written record of it aside from a newspaper article.

The 2011 flood, unlike most of the others, was a summer flood caused not by excessive snowmelt, but excessive rainfall over a large area in Saskatchewan. It was so rare the USGS has not ventured a statistical analysis. Is it a 300-year flood? A 500-year flood? To Wiche, settling on one number is probably as good as another.

What can be said is there has not been a flood like this past summer’s for the 108 years in which there are records and there has not been a drought like the Depression-era drought for 116 years.
Worst for predictions, the question of risk is tied to wet and dry periods, according to Wiche. When the statistical model for flooding was developed, scientists thought the chance of a flood is random and is equal in every year. Scientists now know that the chance of a flood during a drought is much less than during a wet period.

“How do you adjust for these relatively long wet and dry periods?” Wiche said. “The science is still evolving.”

In other words, a 100-year flood predicted 75 years ago is going to be different than a 100-year flood predicted today.

“It’s kind of a moving target; it necessarily would change if the climate shifted to be wetter or dryer,” Buan said.

In the meantime, those who would fight flood and struggle for a secure water supply continue their work.

Like Jensen, the people of Minot and Velva and other communities up and down the valley don’t plan on going anywhere.

In fact, more and more are coming to take advantage of the booming oil industry farther west. Heeding the lessons of the recent flood, new homes and businesses are built in the hills.

But the new people also need water, as does the fracking technology employed by oil explorers. The Depression-era drought may have other lessons to teach.

Tu-Uyen Tran writes for the Grand Forks Herald