The new water wars: on the Missouri and rivers further east, dying industries control the flow and leave emerging businesses high and dry

Rain is forecast south of Sioux City, Iowa, so the team decides to release slightly less water into the lower stretch of river that flows from Sioux City into the Mississippi above St. Louis. The water gods command that the flow of river through Gavins Point be scaled back to 32,500 cubic feet per second from 33,000, as it had been. A flow of 33,000 cubic feet of water amounts to roughly 250,000 gallons, enough to inundate a football field to the depth of one foot.

They email their instructions to Gavins Point Dam, 160 miles north at the South Dakota-Nebraska border, where they arrive on Dennis O'Rourke's computer screen much faster than I can make the trip north to see them executed.

Releasing all this water from Gavins Point is a one-finger job, and I imagine Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" as O'Rourke stretches out his finger to enter the command. Instantly, there's movement beneath us in the 54,000-horsepower turbines that generate electricity from the raging water. Inside the turbines, 10-feet high, four-ton wicket gates close ever so slightly, like Venetian blinds, diminishing the flow of water from Lewis and Clark Lake, a reservoir on the north side of the dam, through the dam and out into the Missouri River on the other side.

The Corps of Engineers' control of the water on the Missouri stems from the 1940s, when Congress, having just beaten the fascists and in search of grand projects at home, began to assign the Army to dam and manage rivers. Two audacious bureaucrats--an Army engineer named Col. Louis Pick who had headed the Corps' Omaha office, and an easygoing assistant chief in the Bureau of Reclamation's Billings office named Glenn Sloan--had been pushing for a new regime of federal management of the Missouri. They were aided in their quest by municipal boosters from Montana to Missouri who were panicked by the river's regular floods and believed the river's barge industry would benefit if the vessels could more reliably traffic the river. Congress, its members smelling pork projects for their districts, agreed, allowing the Corps and the Bureau of Reclamation to combine their contradictory river development plans in the Pick-Sloan Act. Since then, the Missouri River has been managed under the precepts set down in the Corps' Master Manual, which makes the lower river's navigation for barge traffic a priority. But by the time the Corps completed its nine-foot-deep channel from St. Louis to Sioux City in 1981, the barge business it had been designed to accommodate was beginning to become economically obsolete.

Sunk!

"What we've got here is like an old-fashioned Western water fight," insists barge industry executive Don Huffman, a Missourian who retired recently after more than three decades in the barge business. "They want the water up there and we want it down here."

It takes perspective as long as Huffman's to defend the vitality of Missouri barging. We were headed toward success until the 1980 grain embargo, the barge industry says, one in a list of laments as long as it is arcane. Managed low flows have destroyed reliability and run off potential customers. We just need another chance. We're an industry under siege, facing off against conservationists, upstream recreationists, and shrinking revenues.