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Nebraska Flooding: When the Government Cares More about Birds than People americanthinker.com/articles/2019/…
Since 2004, the Corps has been notching levees and dikes and re-opening old river chutes, destabilizing the once-shored riverbanks and encouraging shallowing and widening to facilitate the construction of "emergent sandbar habitat"
Sandbar habitatis believed to be beneficial to the endangered Least Tern and Piping Plover bird species and the Pallid Sturgeon, a dinosaur of a fish that somehow managed to survive for millennia without the Corps's assistance.
The Corps's mechanical alterations of the river have combined to the detriment of flood control by raising the water surface elevation, dramatically reducing the ability of the river to accept runoff from adjoining fields and hundreds of tributaries that all rely on the Missouri.
It is this engineered reduction in capacity, combined with ill considered maintenance of unnecessarily high reservoir and river levels, that made certain the freakish snowmelt generated by thebomb cyclone of early March had nowhere to go except everywhere it should not have been.
That is why flooding has increased in frequency and severity, not climate change, nor a failure of the dam system to work as designed.
The dam system's design has been thwarted in service to an environmentalist dream of a return to an untamed river, free to nourish Mother Earth with its life-giving waters as Mother River again embraces her beloved child, the floodplain.
To hell with those in the way.
To hell with those in the way.
