Lower Mississippi at Riddles Point, Missouri

The Lower Mississippi River is essentially a ditch, a navigation channel that carries barges. Wing dams, dikes set perpendicular to the bank, direct the force of the current to the center of the river to assure a deep navigation channel. Closing dams across side channels that run between islands and the bank make it impossible for the river to adopt a side channel as its main channel.

Now The Nature Conservancy has supported a Corps of Engineers study to the tune of $400,000 that will examine the possibilities of opening these side channels. Of that $400,000, $200,000 comes from Wells Fargo.  The study is due out in 2014.

The engineers have never done such a study on the Lower River, south of its confluence with the Ohio. But the St. Louis District of the Corps of Engineers has been opening up side channels for years and has an instructive video on YouTube. 

From the Mississippi: A Visual Biography:

“The St. Louis District devised a tabletop model on which they could test ways to move water and sediment around and create habitat for fish in the remaining Middle River side channels. The small scale allowed them to model each side channel individually. They could try out various schemes: modify existing river wing dams, notch or remove closing dams across the heads of side channels, install chevron dikes or traditional dikes or hard points in the side channels, or dredge excess sediment from them.

“Notches in closing dams allowed water to flow through and scour sediment from side channels. Removing them altogether was better. Hard points, mini-wing dams constructed of rock or wood and set in side channels, forced water to scour side channels without a significant build-up of sediment between points. At the same time hard points scoured deep holes, habitat for fish, particularly catfish, under the points. Small chevron dikes, “C”-shaped dikes, allowed water to flow around them and open up side channels, while producing a scour hole on the inside of the dike for fish habitat. Once the collaborators understood the dynamics of creating habitat in each channel, it was an easy step to move on to constructing the improvements.

“At the end of the 1990s the collaborators went on to develop the Mississippi River Side Channel Rehabilitation and Conservation Project with the aim of restoring the twenty-three remaining side channels on the Middle River and ten of those that had closed completely. They carried their plan beyond restoring the channels themselves to acquiring land adjacent to the channels. Given the additional land they could reforest the banks of the channels, some of which were farmed clear up to their edges; reestablish the ridge and swale bottomland topography, where water flowing through the channels eroded or deposited sediment on the banks; regain cut bank habitat, places where fish could rest and nest; provide the public with access to the side channels for recreation and education. They noted that in some cases it would make more sense for private individuals, industry, or organizations such as The Nature Conservancy the American Land Conservancy and to acquire the lands bordering the channels.”

Calico Island and Chute: Broken wooden closing dam

As a part of the Middle Mississippi Side Channel program, the engineers examined Calico Chute and found it in pretty good shape. After the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service established the Middle Mississippi National Wildlife Refuge in 2000, the agency considered including Calico Island in the refuge, should the funds ever become available to purchase the island from its present owner.

Jefferson Barracks Dike Field

Attempts to create a side channel through the Jefferson Barracks Dike Field by notching the northern most wing dam opened up a pond at the head of the dike field, but failed to create a side channel along the true bank of the river.

The Corps video linked above shows that the engineers have taken their methods for opening side channels a step beyond notching closing dams. They are using SCEDs, wing dams that direct some of the river’s current into the closed side channels.

Confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi River

When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, it put the Corps of Engineers in charge of regulating the dredging and filling of the nation’s wetlands. “Under Section 404 of the act, Congress authorized the Corps of Engineers to issue permits for the dredging and filling of wetlands under guidelines developed by the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA can, in effect, deny a permit or kill a Corps’ project if it finds it has a “significant degradation of municipal water supplies, including surface or groundwater; or significant loss or damage to fisheries, shellfishing, wildlife habitat, or recreation areas.” Finally, using the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act of 1934, Congress gave the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service the authority to review and comment on the effects activities proposed or permitted by the Corps would have on fish and wildlife. ” For more information see The Mississippi.

Now, the Barrassa/Heller Amendment to  H.R. 2354: Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012 seeks to remove that authority from the Corps. It reads:

SA 939. Mr. BARRASSO (for himself and Mr. HELLER) submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by him to the bill H.R. 2354, making appropriations for energy and water development and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2012, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows:

On page 88, between lines 18 and 19, insert the following:

Sec. 1__. None of the funds made available by this or any other Act making funds available for energy and water development may be used by the Corps of Engineers to develop, adopt, implement, administer, or enforce a change or supplement to the rule entitled “Final Rule for Regulatory Programs of the Corps of Engineers” (51 Fed. Reg. 41206 (November 13, 1986)) (as in effect on the date of enactment of this Act), or to the guidance documents entitled “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on the Clean Water Act Regulatory Definition of `Waters of the United States’ ” (68 Fed. Reg. 1991 (January 15, 2003)), and “Clean Water Act Jurisdiction Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Decision in `Rapanos v. United States & Carabell v. United States’ ” (December 2, 2008) (as in effect on that date of enactment), relating to the definition of waters under the jurisdiction of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq.).

1 Mississippi is asking its members, 10,000 strong since September, to write their Senators to vote note on the Barrasso/Heller amendment to the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012–H.R, 2354. When you open the document, submit your zip code, a letter will come up along with the phone numbers of your senators. Sign the letter and then call your senators. Tell them to vote against the amendment.

Follow up: Should one or both of your senators vote for the amendment, send him an email expressing your disappointment.

Update: William K. Reilly, EPA administrator 1989-1993 under the first George Bush, enlarges on the issues facing the Clean Water Act in light of two Supreme Court rulings and the Republican House antipathy to any regulation. The house passed the Barrasso/Heller amendment in July.

American Bottom: Jefferson Barracks Borrow Pit

I don’t think the farmer who tills this field just east of the Jefferson Barracks Bridge that connects St. Louis County, Missouri to Monroe County, Illinois calls the borrow pit that lies between the levee and his wheat field the Jefferson Barracks Borrow Pit, but I do, because I have been watching and making photographs of it for the last two years. The field and the borrow pit have been flooded for the better part of three years and it really flooded this year. But we had a dry summer–after a real winter with snow, particularly up north and west, and a very wet spring–and the field dried out. So did the borrow pit.

When a levee district builds a levee, it takes the soil for the structure from a borrow pit on the riverside of the levee. When the river floods, it pours water into the borrow pit, filling it. It also delivers two or three inches of sediment to the borrow pit with each flood. Flood after flood has filled this pit with mud. In a really big flood, like the one we had this year, fish swim into the field and the borrow pit. In earlier years, before the pit filled with mud, it was a good fishing pond because it retained water and fish.

Egrets feeding on fish in a borrow pit puddle

As the flood drains away the fish are corralled into the lowest points in the field/borrow pit and the egrets and other wading birds move in and feed on the fish.  Gulls follow the egrets. When the borrow pit completely dries out, the raccoons arrive.

Dead fish, mostly Asian carp, in the Jefferson Barracks Borrow Pit

When I was researching The Mississippi: A Visual Biography, I learned effort to create the Upper Mississippi Fish and Wildlife Refuge started with fish rescue. When the river flooded, fish would swim into the shallow side channels of the river. When the flood receded, the fish would be trapped. When the side channels dried out, the fish would die. Conservationists in the 1920s would rescue fish from the side channels before they dried out. When confronted with the field of dead Asian carp, no one is particularly interested in fish rescue.

Paddlefish and Asian Carp

However, Asian carp are no the only fish which ventured into this field. So did paddlefish and blue gills.

Two carp and a blue gill

It has been just under twenty years since the Flood of 1993 when the first Asian carp escaped catfish farms and invaded the Mississippi, clouding out other species. Now when the Mississippi floods and the flood recedes, stranded Asian carp pepper the landscape. Here and there are interspersed a few desirable fish–like paddlefish and blue gills.

Wheat Field and dead carp

The farmer who tills the field between the borrow pit and the river was optimistic this fall and planted wheat in the field. In doing so, he tilled Asian carp carcasses into his field. If the farmer is lucky, the field won’t flood before the wheat is ready for harvesting next June.

Little White Lake, White River National Wildlife Refuge, Arkansas

The White River National Wildlife Refuge is 115,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest, a mere postage stamp when compared to the 25 million acres that covered the Lower Mississippi Valley before Europeans arrived and cleared it for farmland and cities. Nevertheless, it is the place to go to understand the variety of ecosystems in a bottomland forest and swamp

Spring and summer visits to the refuge can be frustrating because so much of it can be underwater and the creeks and lakes and forests are not accessible. Not any more.

The White River Refuge Trail

The refuge celebrated the opening of a 3/4 mile long trail that starts on high ground near refuge headquarters, descends into bottomland hardwoods–Nutall oak, willow oak, and sweet gum on slightly higher land, overcup oak and bitter pecan on lower land; crosses a swamp on a boardwalk through cypress and tupelo; and continues around along the White River to its end. For most of the years the boardwalk will carry visitors above any flooding. During extreme floods, like that of 2011 which covered the boardwalk, its construction is flood proof.

White River National Wildlife Refuge, Drainage

Wigwam Slough off Goose Island

The duck are migrating and need to find quiet places to fatten up and rest about every fifty miles. There are refuges on the mainland, like Green Island in Iowa and Spring Lake in Illinois. And there is the river itself, once a maze of islands and sloughs, changed by the construction of the dams:

“From Minneapolis to Alton, the river drops 327 feet in elevation. Along that stretch of the Upper Mississippi, the locks and dams and the nine-foot channel formed a river staircase of twenty-six shallow lakes or pools. The locks lifted or dropped shipping from one pool to the next. The dams created three distinct habitats within each pool: In the tailwater, downstream from the dam, the river remained almost unchanged, a maze of deep sloughs and wooded islands, a home to diving ducks, especially scaup. Here, transitory islands that might have washed away in the next flood became permanent islands. In the mid-section of each pool, there were large areas of shallow, open water where the dams flooded hay meadows and floodplain forests. These areas turned into broad marshlands–Weaver Bottoms, Spring Lake, and others, where wildlife–fish and puddle-ducks like mallards–thrived.”–From The Mississippi: A Visual Biography

At the end of the twentieth century the Wisconsin DNR and the Corps of Engineers made the first attempts to aleviate the flooded conditions of the lower third of the navigation, by drawing down water levels behind the dams. They started on a small scale in the 1990s and graduated to whole pools in the first years of the twenty-first century, when they drew down Pool 8 and watched the grasses grow.

At the beginning of the summer of 2001, the Corps of Engineers drew down Pool 8 by eighteen inches to expose submerged sandbars and allow dormant seeds to germinate. The Flood of 2001 delayed start of the drawdown by three weeks and shortened its duration to forty days. It did, however, expose two thousand acres of sediment. The seeds responded: arrowhead, nutgrass, rice cutgrass, millet, smartweed, and American lotus. Fifty species of moisture-loving plants, emergent plants, and aquatic plants took root. Shore birds and wading birds patrolled the exposed mud flats. Swimmers basked on the sandy islands; campers pitched their tents; anglers cast their lines.

Plants in the mid-section of the pool remained above water longer than those in the lower regions of the pool, which were reinundated in mid-August. In October migrating waterfowl–tundra swans, ducks, and geese–stopped to rest and feed on the new plants.

U.S. Geological Survey personnel from the Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center at Onalaska, Wisconsin monitored the growth of the vegetation in eight backwater areas in Pool 8, including the pond between Goose Island and the delta of Mormon Creek. There they found an increase in both submergent plants–coontail and various pondweeds and rooted floating leaf plants–water lilies. The agencies repeated the drawdown in 2002.[i]

Goose Island: Stoddard Slough

The drawdown of Pool 8 was so successful, that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began to close sections of the pool to boats and hunting to allow migrating ducks a place to rest. They first close the 984-acre Goose Island complex of islands and sloughs to boats and hunters in 2007 and they will this year from October 15 to the end of hunting season on December 4. Two other areas will be closed: the Wisconsin Islands–behind Lock and Dam 8, also in Pool 8 and the Lake Onalaska Voluntary Waterfowl Avoidance Area in Pool 7. Strategically placed buoys alert hunters that they are entering a no-go area.

While hunters may not enter these resting and feeding areas, they do lurk outside them and blast away at the ducks as they leave, injuring more ducks than they kill.

---

[i]             Eberhard, Christina, Drawdown, habitat restoration may be coming to Pool 5 soon,” Winona Post Online, Sunday, August 11, 2002; USGS, Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center, Vegetation Response to a Water-Level Drawdown of Pool 8 of the Upper Mississippi River,” http://www.umesc.usgs.gov/aquatic/drawdown_p8_veg.html; USGS, Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center, “ Pool 8 Transect Data Summary,”  http://www.umesc.usgs.gov/data_library/vegetation/transect/pool8/p8_summary.html; Verstegen, Peter, “Pool 8 drawdown recharges plants, helps waterfowl,” Crosscurrents, October, 2002, St. Paul District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, http://www.mvp.usace.army.mil/docs/crosscurrents/October2002a.pdf.

“From the river St. Peters to the falls of St. Anthony, the river is contracted between high hills, and is one continual rapid or fall, the bottom being covered with rocks which (in low water) are some feet above the surface, leaving narrow channels between them. The rapidity of the current is likewise much augmented by the numerous rocky islands, which obstruct the navigation.” –Lt. Zebulon Pike, 1805

Dam at the Falls of St. Anthony

Ten thousand years before Father Louis Hennepin came upon the Falls of St. Anthony and named them, River Warren “poured over the Big Stone Moraine at Browns Valley, Minnesota and scoured the Minnesota River gorge to bedrock. When it entered a buried river channel at St. Paul, River Warren Falls developed and retreated upstream, gnawing away at the soft sandstone that lay under the limestone cap. The caprock collapsed, creating the Mississippi gorge between St. Paul and Fort Snelling. At Fort Snelling River Warren Falls eroded past the entrance to the Mississippi and created the Falls of St. Anthony, a tributary waterfall, which eroded the sandstone under the limestone caprock, leaving a gorge filled it with fallen blocks of limestone between Fort Snelling and Minneapolis.”

European explorers found a gorge filled with rapids that dropped seventy-three feet in elevation over the course of seven miles. While navigation through the rapids was often impossible, they provided an excellent spawning ground for fish and mussels.

In 1680 the Falls of St. Anthony were the geological and biological breakpoint between the headwaters of the Mississippi and the Upper Mississippi. Of the 123 species of fish that swim the Mississippi below the falls, fifty-nine have never ventured above the falls. Channel catfish, ubiquitous between St. Paul and Louisiana, never breached the falls to inhabit the headwaters, nor did lake sturgeon or white bass or brook trout, though brook trout was introduced at a later date.

Had Minneapolis never become the flour milling capital of the United Stated in the 1880s and built a stabilization dam to harness the power of the Falls of St. Anthony to grind grain, the tributary waterfall would have continued its retreat upstream and eventually peter out into a rapids where the limestone caprock came to an end.

Had Minneapolis never had ambitions to become the head of navigation on the Upper Mississippi and built pair of locks and dams to extend navigation four and a half miles above the falls, the Asian Carp would not be threatening the Headwaters of the Mississippi.

Two locks and dams ease the passage of barges through the gorge between Fort Snelling and Minneapolis. The first the Ford Dam was built in 1917; the Corps of Engineers completed the second at the Falls of St. Anthony in 1963. Environmentalists and local and state officials who see the Asian carp headed their way, want to see the locks on the two dams closed. What barges can’t pass through, carp can’t pass through. Silver carp dna has been found in the St. Croix River and a commercial fisher caught a bigheaded carp in the St. Croix. However, no carp dna has been found at Hidden Falls just south of the Ford Dam, the first barrier to the fish passage up the Mississippi.

Blackhoof Lake near Ironton, Minnesota

Environmentalists in Minnesota have the same concerns as those in Michigan: should the carp pass through the geological and biological break that are the Falls of St. Anthony or rather the Lock and Dam at the falls, the fish will invade the headwater fishing grounds, a labyrinth of lakes and streams connected to the Mississippi, and change the ecological balance of the headwaters.

Elk River, tea-colored from runoff from surrounding bogs

Asian Carp leap out of the water when disturbed. Image from the Illinois River Biological Station

It’s been a almost a year since I last wrote about Asian Carp. The Silver Fin leaps out of the water when disturbed and the Bighead is just big, coming in at a hundred pounds spread out along four feet. As food their bad behavior has given them a bad rap.

The State of Illinois, which has been hassling with the carp for years in an effort to keep the fish out of Lake Michigan, where it promises to change the ecology of the lake. It’s swimming up the Illinois River, where it constitutes 80% of the biomass, from the Mississippi and has entered the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal, which cuts through the natural divide between drainage to the Great Lakes and drainage to the Gulf of Mexico. Lake Michigan is a prime fishing ground for both recreational and commercial fishers. Stand on the shores of the lake on a summer evening and you see the lights of salmon fishers heading out to their fishing grounds.

Lake Michigan at the Mouth of the Sauble River at Luddington State Park

In China Asian Carp is a delicacy, served up in pricy restaurants. Illinois officials would like to see it caught and minced and served up in food pantries and soup kitchens, where the patrons find it yucky. Is it the flavor or the bad rap that is coloring their taste buds?

In Louisiana Baton Rouge Chef Phillipe Parola has been working with the Louisiana DNR to develop recipes for Asian carp. I sampled his Carp Cakes a year ago at the dedication of the National Great River Research and Education Center in Alton. Quite good. Today, September 22, 2011, Chef Parola will serve one of his recipes for carp to 350 homeless people.

In Chicago Chef Phillip Foss, who has done a lot of thinking about the carp, is searching for ways to turn Asian Carp into a delicacy and created Asian-Carpaccio. Go to his blog and download the recipe.

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources wants to change the image of the fish in order to change its appeal to American taste buds. But, DNR personnel have yet to figure out the most efficient way to process the very, very bony fish. Mince it and serve it as fried Carp Cakes; fillet it and serve it grilled or poached or seared with a nice Chardonnay; can it and use it as a meat substitute. Rename it: we used to call Chilean Sea Bass the Patagonian toothfish. We renamed it, got people to love it, and overfished it in a very short period of time.

The chances of overfishing Asian Carp are remote. They reproduce like rabbits: The female produces 1.9-2.2 million eggs a year. Even if only 1 to 3% reach adulthood, that’s a lot of fish, whose only natural predator is us or could be us, if we could get over the yuck-factor and figure how to catch them. Clearly this guy fishing at Lock and Dam 26 at Alton, Illinois has gotten over the yuck-factor and seems to have had no trouble catching them on a line.

String of Carp caught at Lock and Dam #26, Upper Mississippi River, Alton, Illinois

But line fishing doesn’t work well. In the  six years since the beginning of the Redneck Fishing Tournament on the Illinois River in 2005, bowfishers have nailed the flying fish with arrows. And no one has developed a system of netting them.

East Channel of the Upper Mississippi in Pool 10 at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin

The McKnight Foundation and the Walton Family Foundations and a network of other organizations with interests in the Mississippi River have started a campaign to “the land, water, and people of America’s greatest watershed.”

1 Mississippi encourages those who know and love the Mississippi River and its wetlands to sign up and become River Citizens. It’s free, and in signing up you make your first declaration of what you will do for the river.

If you are at loose ends about what you can do for the river, 1 Mississippi has seven suggestions, eight actually:

1. Sign up and become a river citizen;

2. Volunteer on the river: clean up, plant trees, engage in other restoration work such as grass planting on barrier islands in Louisiana:

Low water at Duck Chute at the Confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, between the west bank and Duck Island

3. Get to know the river: take short canoe trips on the river, such as through the islands at the Confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri; play in the festivals along the river; hike through its wildlife refuges; visit its nature centers.

Timablier Island at the Gulf of Mexico

4 and 5. Reduce fertilizer and pesticide use: When we phosphorous-based fertilize and use weed killers on our lawns, what the grass doesn’t use washes into our sewers and ultimately into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, where the fertilizers nourish algae, which creates low oxygen conditions and a Dead Zone, which upsets the migration of fish and shrimp from their nurseries in Louisiana’s wetlands to the gulf; fertilizers also nourish algae behind the dams on the Upper Mississippi, creating low oxygen conditions there. Use phosphorous-free fertilizers on your lawn, or turn your lawn over to ground cover–ivy, no mowing.

6. Support sustainable agriculture: This is way harder than using less fertilizer on your lawn, because farmers resist using less fertilizer on their fields of corn and soybeans. More and more fertilizers have washed off Midwest farm fields, starting with the Flood of 1993 to the Flood of 2011, nourishing a larger and larger Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico. One way you can support sustainable agriculture is to become a Locavor and buy your fruits and veggies at local farmers’ markets, or go to the farm itself, buy your produce, and get to know the farmer.

7. Protect wetlands: By protecting wetlands from development, we can reduce the impact of floods, because wetlands act like storage units for floodwater.

8. Though it’s not called 8: Get to know your elected representatives–local, state, and national. Get to know their voting records. Get to know the issues before them and let them know where you stand on them. Vote for candidates who make the river their priority.

Weaver Bottoms

While I was researching The Mississippi: A Visual Biography, I spent a morning with Mike Davis, who researches mussels on the Upper Mississippi for the Minnesota DNR. Mike pointed to a shelf in the corner of his conference room at his office in Lake City, and ranted about the number of studies the Corps of Engineers does that go no where or not far enough. The following morning he took me out into Weaver Bottoms and Half Moon Lake near West Newton, Minnesota and showed me how deposits of sediment trapped behind Upper Mississippi  dams–Lock and Dam #5 in this cas–from its tributaries were smothering mussel beds in Weaver Bottoms.

In 1986 Congress passed the Water Resources Development Act which included the Upper Mississippi River Management Act, which acknowledged that the Upper Mississippi is a nationally significant ecosystem as will as a nationally significant navigation system and was an effort to restore its degrading marshes and islands.

Bayou Rigolettes Shoreline Restoration Project

In 1990 Congress passed the Water Resources Development Act which included the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protections, and Restoration Act, also know as the Breaux Act and know familiarly twenty years later as CWPPRA. Both acts funded small ecosystem restoration projects.

Lock and Dam 26, Alton, Illinois

Neither act did anything to change the factors that caused the degrading ecosystems. The dams on the Upper Mississippi remained in place and continued to trap sediment behind them, smothering mussle beds.

MRGO at Ycloskey

Navigation channels like MRGO and oil company channels  remained in place, funneling salt water into freshwater marshes, killing them. The levees along the Mississippi would remain in place, depriving marshes in Barataria Bay and Breton Sound precious freshwater and sediment whenever the Mississippi had a flood like the one of 2011 or any other flood.

By 1998 the people working  to restore the Louisiana coastal marshes–the Corps of Engineers, the Louisiana DNR, the EPA, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, etc–recognized that small projects were never going to do the job. They signed the Coast 2050 Feasibility Cost Share agreement, by which they would share the $14 billion cost of repairing Louisiana’s coastal marshes. Not until 2003 did the New Orleans District of the Corps of Engineers come up with the draft study of the project. The Bush administration paled at the cost and sent the engineers back to work to come up with the smaller, more focused, less expensive proposal of projects that could be completed in the near term. The Corps published the $1.9 billion Louisiana Coast Area Ecosystem Restoration Study in 2007 and Congress authorized it in the 2007 Water Resources Development Act, but did not fund it.

In the years following the passage of the 1986 Upper Mississippi act, it became clear that small projects were not going to do the job there. In 2000 the Corps of Engineers treated the nation to the lock extension scandal, a proposal to extend the locks on five dams north of the Alton Dam, #26, north of St. Louis. It seems the engineers cooked the books to justify the extension and a Corps economists called them out on it. When the dust settled, Congress authorized the Navigation and Ecosystem Sustainability Program, which included the lock extension, but also authorized a$1.7 billion ecosystem restoration program in the 2007 Water Resources Development Act, and ordered the Corps of Engineers to pursue lock extension and ecosystem restoration simultaneously, but funded neither.

That Congress included the Louisiana Coast Area Ecosystem Restoration Study, puny though in was in light of the need, and the  Navigation and Ecosystem Sustainability Program, even if it included lock extension, in the 2007 Water Resources Development Act brought hope to those of us who care about the Upper Mississippi and the Louisiana coastal islands and marshes. The economy was in recession when President signed the act into law. The economy crashed the following September. Congress still has not funded either program.

That Congress has not funded the lock extension gives Upper River environmentalists hope that they will never be funded, but nor will ecosystem restoration.

BP agreed to a $20 billion fund to compensate those people whose businesses along the Gulf Coast were harmed by last summer’s massive oil spill. Environmentalists and others hoped that some of that money could go into ecosystem restoration.

Last week the New Orleans District of the Corps of Engineers signed yet another agreement with the State of Louisiana to study the possibility of redesigning the Mississippi to divert water and sediment to Barataria Bay to the east and Breton Sound to the west.

We know what needs to be done on both the Upper Mississippi and the Louisiana Coast. We have studied the ecosystem deterioration to death and the marshes continue to die. What we end up with is a pile of unfunded studies.

Monroe County, Illinois

“On the right side of the river. The bank of the river from Little Plateen to this place has a majestic appearance. It is a continued rock of limestone rising from the base, declining step by step to the height of 2 or 300 feet; the steps or ledges not more than 6 inches deep, and appear as if cut by the chisel; and here and there springing forth are small cedars.”–Zadok Cramer, 1814

Missouri Bluff and Calico Island and Chute

At Calico Island the Mississippi threads it way between the tall bluff on the Missouri bank and Calico Island in the Illinois bank.

Channel training devices, wingdams, diverted the rivers erosive power from the side channels to the navigation channels, where they scoured a navigation channel south of Alton. Closing dams across side channels, installed to prevent the river from adopting a side channel as its main channel. Sediment washing off the floodplain silted in the side channels, damaging habitat for fish and migrating waterfowl. What where once islands became part of the mainland. At the beginning of the twenty-first century only twenty-three side channels remained in the Middle Mississippi between Alton and the Ohio River, and they were severely degraded.

Calico Island and Chute: Broken wooden closing dam

In 1994 a group of biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, the Missouri Department of Conservation, and engineers from the Applied River Engineering Center at the St. Louis District of the Corps of Engineers formed a collation to restore riverine habitat to side channels of the Mississippi, while at the same time maintaining a reliable navigation channel. The collaborators build a table-sized model on which they could test their ideas for restoring habitat to Calico Chute and others in the Middle Mississippi.

When engineers and biologists examined Calico Chute, they found it in pretty good shape. Its width varied between 125 and 250 feet with an average of 200 feet. When the river ran low, its average depth of the channel was about nine feet, but there were places where it was a deep as twenty-one feet and places where it was almost dry, leaving its sandy bottom exposed. Old, broken wooden pile dikes marked the head and the foot of the chute. While Calico Island, 250 acres, on its right bank was heavily forested, farmers had stripped the 500 acres of floodplain on its left bank of trees for farm fields.

Little needed to be done to restore the diversity of its depth. Engineers inserted hard points constructed of rock, wood, or both at high energy areas along the chute to create deep scour holes for fish. They dredged where they didn’t want sand and added sand where they did, enlarging the sand bar at the foot of the island. Using sand dredged from the channel, they created ridges on the banks and anchored them with trees. Wherever possible they allowed water to flow through the chute and create a ridge and swale landscape. Finally, to reduce the amount of silt washing off the adjacent fields and into the chute, they would if they could reforest the denuded left bank with a riparian buffer of trees and shrubs at least a hundred feet deep.[i]

When the Corps of Engineers returned to Calico Chute after the passage of the Navigation and Ecosystem Sustainability Program in 2007, researchers found that Calico Chute lost connectivity to the main channel at low water. They predicted that the chute would be lost by 2050 if no work were done to open up the side channel.

That’s the bad news. The good news is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would like to include Calico Island in the Middle Mississippi NWR, should be funds to purchase the land from twenty-two willing sellers ever become available.