A perennial battle over the waters of the Missouri river may be breaking out again. The governor of Missouri is asking for managers of the big dams upriver in the Dakotas to open the floodgates and release more water from their reservoirs down the Missouri River. Governor Bob Holden says low water flows this spring already have delayed barge shipments of fertilizer for about a quarter of the state’s farmland. He says it’s a time-critical situation with planting coming up. Missouri and other downstream states have been locked in a political battle for years with upriver states, which say boating and fishing on the reservoirs behind the dams mean tens of millions of tourism dollars to their economies.
