Water level shy for rise in March

Water levels in the reservoir system that feeds the Missouri River are too low for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to release water for the first of two spring rises this year.

The corps will not make a final decision until Wednesday. But as of Monday, the upriver reservoirs had 36.32 million acre-feet of water, just shy of the 36.5 million acre-feet needed to go forward with the rise, said John LaRandeau, civil engineer for the corps.

“I suppose anything could happen, maybe a cloud will show up and dump a bunch of rain right on the reservoir,” LaRandeau said. “But really, it doesn’t look good for the first one.”

The March pulse was part of a controversial spring rise plan the corps released last month that’s designed to help the endangered pallid sturgeon spawn. The rises would aim to mimic the natural pulses that took place before the Missouri River was dammed: one when snow melted in March on the Plains and one when snow melted in the Rocky Mountains in May.

The reservoir level decreased since the end of January, when the corps released its plan because of a cold snap in February that froze tributaries and reduced the inflow of water into the reservoirs.

The May pulse could still happen if rainfall or snowmelt raises the reservoir levels above the minimum. If the reservoir level does not reach this point, the corps won’t have a rise until 2007.

The May rise is forecasted to raise river levels at Boonville about 1.5 feet.

LaRandeau said the snowpack above the Fort Peck dam in Montana and the Garrison dam in North Dakota is about 100 percent of normal levels.

“The snow in the Rockies looks really good, so there will likely be a May pulse, but that depends on weather,” he said.

The corps’ plan for the rise came after more than a decade of debate among environmental groups, farmers, the barge industry and politicians.

Opponents say the rise poses a flooding risk because of the potential for unforeseen rain in the basin once the water is released upstream. Travel time from the Gavins Point dam, where water would be released, to Missouri ranges from five to 11 days. While the risk of the water rising over the levees is low, the risk of it backing up into fields through drainage tubes is higher, said Robert Jacobson, hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Columbia.

Jacobson will be part of a team of researchers collecting information about the sturgeon and river conditions this year. Jacobson said that even if the March or May rises don’t occur, his team will conduct the same monitoring of pallid sturgeon.

“For every good experiment, you need a control group, so if the rise doesn’t happen at all, we’ll use this year as the control,” he said.