River Of No Return: How NE Reaped The Fruits Of Austerity, GOP Policies & Climate Collapse
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Ruzicka doesn’t want to talk too much about it now, but in the back of his mind, he knew: The Spencer Dam was 92 years old, and state inspectors in April 2018 had classified the risk stemming from its disrepair as “significant.” That classification mandated enough pricey repairs that the Nebraska Public Power District was in the process of transferring the dam to a group of locally controlled natural resources districts. Ruzicka also knew that that river had run twelve feet deep in its banks when he was a boy, but now, due to decades of silting and insufficient dredging, the surface of the water ran barely a foot below the river’s edge. What he didn’t know was that the state inspection also warned that “deficiencies exist which could lead to dam failure during rare, extreme storm events”—or that the power company had workers on the dam that night, opening floodgates in the hopes of keeping the whole structure from washing out.
Sometime before 5:30 a.m., the remaining gates jammed, frozen closed by ice, and the dam started to crumble. The workers issued an emergency warning as they evacuated, and a dispatcher from the sheriff’s department almost immediately called Ruzicka. “You have to get out now,” the voice on the phone said. “I grabbed two things,” Ruzicka remembered, “my cell phone and my billfold.” By the time he got to his pickup, parked in the gravel circle drive in front of his house, the overflowing water was already more than a foot deep. Some 20 miles upriver, the 29-foot-high earth-and-concrete dam gave way, letting loose an eleven-foot wall of water carrying car-size chunks of ice. As Ruzicka’s truck reached the end of the windbreak and crested near the road, the water came roaring in. “When this thing hit, we didn’t have no time, and the poor cows were in them pens,” he says now. The mother cows somehow survived. The calves all drowned in the rising floodwaters. The bulls were swept away.
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First, generations of neglect to key pieces of infrastructure have allowed dams, levees, and dykes across the Midwest and Great Plains to collapse. Of Nebraska’s 137 levees monitored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, fewer than half were constructed with federal oversight and support; not one is currently maintained by the Corps. Of the dozen levees on the Missouri River that failed in March, seven had been classified as “minimally acceptable” nearly a decade ago—and not one has been reinspected since. Three others had never been inspected at all. Maintenance and monitoring were entirely left up to the small towns that they protect; upkeep and improvement has depended on trying to persuade voters to approve expensive bond issues or asking local politicians to approve tax hikes in the midst of the worst rural economic downturn since the Farm Crisis of the 1980s.
In recent years, when a community like Fremont, Nebraska, or nearby Inglewood, has reached out for federal assistance, asking the Corps of Engineers what it would cost to bring its levees and viaducts up to snuff, the city’s leaders often got bad news. In early 2010, Corps officials made a public presentation to the Fremont, Inglewood, and county officials. They warned that Fremont’s earthen levee had become overgrown with tall trees—and this meant that, in the event of a major flood carrying ice floes, the trees could be uprooted and tear holes in the levee, allowing floodwaters to course through. The Corps assembled a proposal for upgrading the system, but it came with the shocking price tag of nearly $28 million from the city. Ironically, conversations about that project were stalled by major flooding in 2011 and again in 2015. Both times, the levees mostly held—and so the local political establishment was able to postpone reckoning with the bigger deluge in the making. What’s more, residents in low-lying areas paid less than $1 million in flood insurance each year; a new levee, the city reasoned, would take at least a generation to pay for. It just wasn’t cost-effective.
But then in March, floes from upriver ice jams tore through the levees exactly as predicted—and when floodwaters finally receded in southern Fremont and the adjoining community of Inglewood, the estimated damage came to $15 million for affected businesses and homes (including the house of Senator Sasse on a Platte back channel). At least another $25 million would have to go toward repairing the damage to federal roads, including Highways 30 and 275, with the state estimating that the costs could be much higher. Taken together, outlays may eventually cost double what it would have taken to upgrade the levee and viaduct—but now those expenditures will be drawn from FEMA and the Department of Transportation’s disaster funds, not a local bond issue.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/153748/nebraska-flooding-austerity-climate-change
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