Electric Co-op Today

Historic winter snowfalls and heavy spring rains are combining to send record amounts of water down the Missouri River. That has co-ops and their consumer-members in parts of the Upper Midwest worried about the worst flooding threats they’ve seen in generations.

Children play in rising floodwaters in Fort Pierre, S.D., May 26, 2011. (Photo By: The Associated Press/Chet Brokaw)

“All that water is starting to make its way into the Missouri River system,” said Dennis Hill, executive vice president of the North Dakota Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives.

Before April 1, major reservoirs in the region were drained to below flood stage capacity, said Hill. “In the past eight weeks, the flood stage pool was refilled, and that’s a first.”

North Dakota’s Lake Sakakawea, the third largest man-made reservoir in the U.S., is expected to see 140 percent-of-normal snowpack runoff, and surrounding cropland is totally saturated.

“Basically, there is little or no storage left in our reservoirs,” said Jody Farhat, chief of the Missouri River Basin Water Management Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Some portions of Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming have gotten more rain in the past two weeks than typically falls in a single year.

“Water releases are forecast to reach 85,000 cubic feet per second out of Garrison and Oahe dams because of steady rain and above-normal mountain snowpack,” Farhat said.

“Snowmelt and additional heavy rainfall may mean even higher releases.”

Tags: Flooding, Preparedness, Weather