Gavins Point Dam -- Photo thanks to US Army Corps of Engineers

Scuba divers are taking a closer look at the spillway area at Gavins Point Dam, near Yankton, South Dakota. The dam was a focal point of last year’s historic flooding along the Missouri River that inundated western Iowa and eastern Nebraska.

That dam released more than 160,000 cubic feet of water per second for several weeks last summer as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dealt with record rain and runoff.

Dave Becker, operations manager at the dam, says some clean-up is needed before they can finish inspections.

“They got 80 to 90% of the spillway inspected but they determined there’s a lot of debris in the spillway that needs to be removed,” Becker says, “sunken water-logged logs, metal frames to things, old boat docks, things like that.”

Becker says the design of the dam makes it more difficult to look at all the wear and tear.

“One of the challenges at our spillway here is, it’s always underwater,” he says. “We can’t do inspections in the dry all the time. There’s in the order of 350 drains on the spillway and we’re determining what level they’ll be inspected at.”

Becker says the dam operated as it was designed to during last year’s flooding and he says there are -no- concerns about the structure being unsound.

“We’ve had some drains that’ve gotten washed away during the flood,” he says. “We’ve had new drains built to replace those. We’ve seen no issues with the concrete. We are concerned somewhat about the gravel, or the frost blanket, down below the concrete so that’s why they want to do the ground-penetrating radar to determine the condition of that.”

Becker says they hope to get much of the work started in the next two weeks. He says a barge and crane will be needed to clean out much of the heavy debris below the dam.

By Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton

Congressman Steve King (R) Iowa

The latest Missouri River study being released by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is being criticized by a congressman as “incomplete” and, in some respects, “inaccurate.”

The study found adding flood storage to the Missouri River system would not have prevented damage to barge and recreational traffic during the record flooding across Nebraska and Iowa last year.

Iowa Congressman Steve King doesn’t buy the claims.

“I think it’s very clear that if they had utilized the storage upstream — and I’m not suggesting they should have seen this coming, but now that they have seen a flood like this, I think it’s incorrect for them to take the position that having the storage upstream would not have protected us from serious damage,” King says. “It would have protected us from exactly what they need to do — it would have protected us from serious downstream flooding.”

King, a Republican from Kiron in western Iowa, is also upset that the Corps released the report without first meeting with members of Congress.

“Now, we have to deal with a public document that I think is incomplete and in some aspects incorrect,” King said. He’s working on setting up a meeting with Corps officials in Omaha.

The Corps report indicates if flood control storage were increased by roughly 30% upstream of Gavins Point Dam in South Dakota, peak releases could be reduced from 160,000 cubic feet per second to 100,000 cfs (C-F-S). But even with the lower releases, the Corps notes widespread damages would not be prevented.

“That’s just simply not true,” King responded. “It would have prevented serious downstream flooding below Gavins Point. If their definition of widespread damage is something that took place in Montana and North Dakota, they should say so.”