OMAHA, Neb. — A U.S. Army Corps official involved with the management of the lakes on the upper Missouri River defended the Corps’ decision on opening up flood gates. Flooding in Missouri and Kansas is blamed in part because the lakes in the Dakotas are releasing record amounts of water because of record amounts of melting snow and rains in the upper Missouri basin. At last night’s Corps news conference, a reporter asked Jodie Farha about news reports that say the Corps was too slow to react to large amounts of snow melt. Farha said the Corps had people personally checking on the amount of snow and forecasts of melting and were operating on the best available information. However the entire basin have unusually high amounts of entering throughout the basin, including heavy and constant rains in May, she said. “Until those rains came in May we did not have an issue or a forecast that showed that we would have releases at historic levels,” Farha said. The rains took away the Corps’ flexibility to react, she said. She also said that the Corps had been tugged by groups of states demanding two exactly different strategies on how much to release from the upper Missouri lakes before the crisis made the question moot.
