It isn't so much the amount of water churning its way down the Missouri River that has people along the nation's longest waterway on edge. It's how long all that water will stick around.
The annual "spring rise" on the Missouri will last deep into this soggy summer, as a torrent of early season rains and winter snowpack flows through wide-open gates of South Dakota's Gavins Point Dam upriver and toward the confluence with the Mississippi River. The Missouri might start to crest soon, but it won't start to fall until August or later.
That constant pressure on the network of levees that protect farmland, roads, small towns and big cities from a river running well outside its banks is what worries folks downriver most as the high water heads south toward Kansas City and east toward St. Louis.
"The length of the flood will test levees like they've never been tested before," Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said. "You're going to see levees which in essence may be tall enough, but not strong enough."
That isn't the only worry as the summer of 2011 shapes up as the worst since 1993, when a Missouri River swollen by weeks of rain over the north-central United States led to flooding that killed 32 people, damaged an estimated 100,000 homes and caused $15 billion in damage.
Movement of information through the Corps bureaucracy.
•The Corps' runoff projections.
•How the flood is affecting fish species.
"Do we know enough about how water runs off the high country and off our own prairies to know how that equates to what happens in reservoirs?" he asked.
The Corps' runoff projections skyrocketed throughout the spring, from 37.8 million acre-feet in April to 44 million acre-feet in May to 52.5 million acre-feet in June. The highest previous runoff ever was in 1997, 49 million acre-feet.
During 1997's record runoff, virtually the entire population of rainbow smelt, food for game fish in Lake Oahe, were swept downstream. That created a collapse in the walleye population, which worries Cooper this year.
The lake, upstream of Pierre, S.D., is the fourth largest artificial lake in the country.
Nathan Young, assistant director of the Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa, said how the Missouri River operates at high flows is also useful knowledge.
"Rivers don't behave the same every time," Young said.
A dynamic river system such as the Missouri and its tributaries is constantly reshaping its riverbed, sandbars and banks. Even variation between winter and summer temperatures influences how the river operates, Young said.
"The more information we can get on extreme flows, the more accurately we can simulate them and make predictions," he said.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is interested in follow-up after the flooding subsides.
Wayne Stancill, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife hydraulic engineer, wants to document the rate at which the river creates new shallow-water habitat for endangered fish such as pallid sturgeon, and bare sandbars where endangered bird species such as the piping plover and least tern can nest.
"One of the questions we are trying to get at this summer, if we can gain access to the flood plain areas, is to see what fish are using these habitats," said Robert Klumb, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife project leader in charge of pallid sturgeon recovery. It may not only be pallid sturgeon, but invasive species such as Asian carp.
One project Stancill wants to see happen involves identifying areas of public land where levees could be breached for flood storage — places that also could boost the vigor of species that have evolved with frequent flooding, such as cottonwood trees.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Geological Survey is doing detailed water elevation measurements for the Corps throughout the summer that should make downstream flood flow and water elevation models more precise, said Eric Stasch, the Corps' engineers program manager at Oahe Dam that creates Oahe Lake.
When the water flow lessens, Corps officials also will look at how the flood moved sediment, and they will assess the condition of flood control structures.
Don't forget economic effects, said Ralph Brown, emeritus economics professor at the University of South Dakota. He has long made the state's economy a subject of research:
•How much loss of wealth is related to the flood?
•Will rebuilding simply restore lost wealth or will it stimulate new economic growth?
•Will the economy have a long-term disruption if flood victims leave rather than rebuild?
The Disaster Mental Health Institute at the university provides support to victims of natural and manmade disasters. It recently has been offering coping skills for first responders, civic officials and the public. The flood could allow psychologists to study how readily victims are receiving this psychological first aid and how well it works, said Jerry Jacobs, the institute director.
"The challenge is going to be funding" for any of the research, said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., especially when paying for the disaster itself is necessary in a tight fiscal climate. The federal government ends up financing most research like that mentioned.
But he added, "I think it makes a lot of sense, based on our experience this year, to do what's necessary to get that kind of information, to collect that kind of data.
"These disasters always cost money," Thune said. "But you look at the after-effects, the treatment effects, and it ends up costing a lot more than if we can figure ways to employ preventive measures."
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