275 Levees Damaged by Floods Will Be Repaired

With bloated Midwestern rivers slowly receding, the Army Corps of Engineers on Wednesday announced plans to repair 275 federal levees damaged or destroyed by floodwaters throughout the Missouri and Mississippi river basins.

The effort, which is not expected to be completed before the next flood season, only aims to restore existing federal flood projects to original condition and will not consider increasing their sizes or configurations pending further study, Corps officals said.

Nor will it deal with at least 800 private, mostly agricultural berms and levees that were overtopped or breached by flooding unless affected communities agree to pay 20% of the cost as required under federal cost-sharing rules, Corps officials said.

“There are hundreds of non-federal levees that have been damaged to various degrees. Most of those are agricultural levees,” said Lt. Gen. Arthur E. Williams, Corps commander. “Those are not the levees that I have the authority to go out and spend public money on.”

He did not give an estimate of the cost of restoring the federal levees. Under federal law the Corps can begin flood control repairs without seeking congressional approval.

“A community might say, ‘We’ve had millions of dollars in damages so let’s build a federal flood wall here.’ But we can’t fund a federal project unless the costs are less than the benefits” anticipated, said Gary R. Dyhouse, chief of the Corps’ hydrologic engineering section in St. Louis.

Williams named Brig. Gen. Albert J. Genetti, commander of the Ohio River Division in Cincinnati, to head a special team of 30 engineers based in St. Louis and charged with “getting us back on track and whole again.”

“We will start at different places at different times as water goes down,” Williams said. “The recovery effort will go on for weeks, in some cases several months.”

Overall, the federal flood control system worked well, Williams said. Of the 275 federal levees affected, 31 were overtopped and three were breached.