An update on flood recovery efforts in western Iowa is on the agenda as the State Interagency Missouri River Authority meets today in Des Moines. Chuck Gipp, deputy director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, says the process of cleaning up all of the damage and rebuilding after last year’s summer-long flood is far from over.

Gipp says, “It’s how you help people recover from that event is the biggest struggle that we have and also to see if there’s anything we can do to avoid a repeat of that in the future.” The authority makes recommendations on policies affecting the Missouri River. Besides the D.N.R., groups involved include the state departments of Homeland Security and Agriculture as well as federal agencies, like FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Gipp says making repairs to the damaged floodwalls all along the river is a high priority.

“The levees are an important part of that because people were accustomed to going behind the levees,” Gipp says. “They were told, initially, that what’s going to occur after the six major dam and reservoirs were built upstream. I guess that Mother Nature told us that you can maybe delay it but you can’t get rid of the flooding aspect.” Gipp says much of the D.N.R.’s role is to help state and federal agencies coordinate during the recovery process.

“A lot of what we do, especially when it comes to levee issues, flood plain issues, is depending on the Corps and FEMA and the reimbursement for that,” Gipp says. “I think there’s a good coordination. Some of that was learned simply because of the experiences on the east side of the state in 2008.” He says the panel will also discuss current and potential hydrologist roles and responsibilities in the state.

An independent review of last year’s prolonged Missouri River flooding says there was little more the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could have done to avoid the widespread, expensive damage. Among those on the review team, Cara McCarthy is senior forecast hydrologist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Portland, Oregon. McCarthy says they looked through a mountain of information.

She says, “First of all, it’s just finding out about the flooding, looking at the numbers and finding out the extremes and then finding out, not just the water amount, but the damage amounts, talking to people and hearing what happened to them.” McCarthy says members of the Corps of Engineers started to react early in the spring as soon as they saw the massive inflows of snow melt and rain move into the reservoir system.

“By May 1, they recognized that they had a lot of water to get rid of, so they had actually started to get rid of water in the beginning of April,” McCarthy says. “Even if they had released more water in April than they did, they couldn’t have evacuated all that water. It was just a tremendous amount of water that came down.”

While she admits it’s difficult to strike a perfect balance, she says the report recommends the Corps find a way to set aside more upstream flood control storage space to avoid a repeat. “That’s really what was needed this year,” McCarthy says. “If you do have that, you have less water in the reservoir so you have less water for recreation and less water for downstream water uses and for irrigation, so this is the problem the whole Missouri River system needs to look at.”

Road repairs from the flooding in Iowa alone exceed 50-million dollars. The Corps estimates almost $600-million in damage was done just to levees along the river.

A climatologist who’s keeping an eye out for another potential flood in the Missouri River basin says conditions now are nearly the opposite of what they were a year ago. South Dakota state climatologist Dennis Todey says the pattern of warmer, drier weather we’ve enjoyed for weeks appears to be changing.

“We are going to be seeing a shift as January goes on to more La Nina-like conditions where temperatures will turn colder,” Todey says. “By later in January, most of the upper part of the basin will go to below-average temperatures, which will be in contrast to what we’ve seen recently.” So far, he says, none of the conditions that spawned widespread flooding in the region last year are appearing this year.

“For much of the basin, where we have very dry soil conditions in certain areas or moderately dry soil conditions, which allows the soil moisture capacity to take up any additional moisture at this point,” Todey says. “That’s quite a contrast from what we had last year where we had fairly widespread wet soil.”

A year ago, heavy snow accumulation combined with an extremely wet spring to create record flooding on the Missouri. Todey, who is working with the federal government on long-range forecasts, says it simply hasn’t snowed much this winter. “There have been a few snows that have come along,” Todey says. “Most of them have not been long-lived. They’ve melted off, so there is very little snow in the basin.”

He says the weather could still break either way, above- or below-average snow and rain for the remainder of the winter.