(blogmaster's note: This great piece from the Yankton Press-Dakotan imagines what Yankton would be like in a year like this if there was no dam just upstream. We can all imagine what the Mississippi River flood might be like if there were no dams as well.)
Originally published on May 13, 2011 in the Yankton Press-Dakotan
Click here for original link
By Kelly Hertz
At least the kids were having a good time.
That’s what the man thought as he watched his young daughter and her friends, who had walked with him down to the river and now decided to stomp merrily through the mire covering Yankton’s Riverside Park on this gray spring day. The river had receded enough to let the kids play on the old vacant grounds. He kept close watch to be sure the youngsters never, ever got close to the rim of the water, which was still lapping across part of the park. He knew if they got into the clutches of that dark, swirling river, there was no telling what might happen.
He was sitting on a small hill of filled, dirty sandbags. They had been placed around Levee Street near Douglas earlier in the spring when the Missouri River waters were rising fast. The bags held, mostly. Fortunately, the river didn’t jam up with ice downstream; if it had, the bags might not have done the job.
He allowed his eyes to slip away from the kids for just a moment and turn to that river, now a restless sea stretching far into Nebraska. When he was a child, the sight mesmerized him. Now, he saw it only in grim, practical terms. It meant a year lost for anyone who tried to farm the lowlands on either side of the river, which wouldn’t help the local economy at a time when it needed a boost. Much worse, that water was a beast that could take lives almost as easily as it could swallow an acre of land. That’s what happened back in 1997, when the mountain snowpack and all that snow in northern South Dakota practically melted at once and roared south.
He watched as the swollen river slithered under the old Meridian Bridge, which is still awaiting demolition. To the west, the high waters even made the new Discovery Bridge seem small, low and marginal.
Flooding was a fact of life with which river towns like Yankton had to live. It didn’t happen every spring, thank goodness; in fact, there were years when all that water might even have been welcome. The only thing worse than the Missouri River on an angry rise was when it was at sleepy low tide in a drought. Then it became a marshy mosquito factory that made life tough and irritating. The arrival of West Nile a few years ago only added to that misery.
He thought back to a few days before, when he’d stood atop Chalkstone Hill overlooking the valley west of town. There, too, he saw a shimmering, useless ocean, dotted with the occasional house from which a family had to take flight.
“It doesn’t look so good, does it?” a voice then cut in. It was a friend of the man’s who had wandered by to watch the river roar along, because there was nothing else one could really do about it.
“It looks better than in ‘97,” the man said.
He then winced, wishing he could suck the words right back out of the air. His friend’s brother died back in the 1997 flood. An ice gorge formed and the water rose too fast. His brother was sucked into the river when some shoreline along the rising water suddenly collapsed.
“Yeah, that was a bad one,” the friend said, seemingly numb now to such memories. “I just hope it keeps going down.”
“At least the kids like it,” the man said, relieved to change the subject. “At least they can use this park for something other than a sandlot.”
“You know,” the friend said in a slightly quieter voice, “this used to be the red light district, back in the old days when there were steamboats.”
“And a garbage dump, I think,” the man replied. “At least someone used this place for something.”
To him, the muck of Riverside Park seemed to typify Yankton. A murky place with a murky future. A shrinking economy. A dwindling population. And now, thanks to one of the Missouri River’s periodic temper tantrums, a flooded river town that had seen better days and was once again at the mercy of a raging, uncontrolled behemoth. Today there was water everywhere, and he hated seeing it.
Just then, he heard a familiar patter on the Levee Street gravel. It began to rain ...
———
What would Yankton be like if Gavins Point Dam — or the entire series of Pick-Sloan dams on the upper Missouri River system — had not been built more than 50 years ago? What if this area had remained at the mercy of a wild river that had dictated a pattern of life in Yankton since the community’s founding?
Maybe, hopefully, not quite like this. Consider this merely as one possibility.
Thankfully, we’ll never know.
It was announced this week that the runoff into the Upper Missouri system this year may be the second highest on record, breaking the old mark set in 1997. Without the dam, this would likely have been an epic, memorable spring awash in inundated bottomlands and sandbagging along some of the lower sections of town. (Fortunately, much of Yankton is on high ground — which was no accident in pioneer planning.) We’d probably see flooding in places like Riverside Park, which could well be little more than a vacant lot due to the threats of rampaging waters. There would be no lake area west of the city, and very few if any residential developments on the bottomland. There would be little in the way of a tourism industry. And we would never know what each spring might bring to us.
It’s hard for many of us to imagine these possibilities because we do not know otherwise. The dam has taken it all away from us. It has made us safe and dry, and it has allowed Yankton to become something that no one could have imagined 150 years ago: a river town with no fear whatsoever of flooding.
And for that ignorance, we should be thankful.
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