Lima Slough meanders through farmfield in Adams County, Illinois

Illinois Congressman Phil Hare (D-Il) presented the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee with 7,000 signatures in support of raising the 50-year levees that protect farm land in Adams, Henderson, and Hancock Counties to the 500-year level.

I have had this rant before. A 500-year levee is an urban levee.

The New Orleans District of the Army Corps of Engineers, where Katrina causes an estimated $81.2 billion in damages, is struggling to design and built a levee that will protect that city from a 100-year hurricane. The National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council have termed the new levees inadequate.

If 100-year levees at New Orleans cost $14 billion (the 1998 estimated cost of restoring the wetlands that protect the Louisiana coast and New Orleans), then how can we built 500-year levees from Minneapolis to St. Louis at a cost of $6 billion, which will create higher and higher flood levels. We saw Davenport, Iowa go underwater in 2001, because the city chose not to live behind floodwalls and the levees protecting farm land across the river forced the flood into the city.

I know the farmers of Adams, Henderson, and Hancock Counties lost $80 million dollars in the Flood of 2008, but, to be blunt, it is part of the cost of doing business in the floodplain.

Last week a pair of geologists, at the University of Texas, Austin, proposed diverting the Mississippi and its sediment to Breton Sound on the east and Barataria Bay to the west in order to build new deltas in each body of water.

Illustration from Science Daily, (Credit: AGU/EOS)

They would make the diversions about ninety miles south of New Orleans, my guess near Grand Bayou on the west, where the Mississippi levee runs, and Bohemia on the east, where the Mississippi River levee ends.

Mississippi River Ridge at Bohemia

Like other who have proposed Mississippi River diversions to build land in Louisiana, they have looked at the landbuilding that is going on at the mouth of the Atchafalaya River and the Wax Lake Outlet from the Atchafalaya Basin. Since the completion of the Old River Control Structure in 1962, the Atchafalaya has funneled off 1/3 of the Mississippi water and sediment at Old River, about 200 miles north of New Orleans. The Atchafalaya also carries all of the Red River and its sediment to the Gulf of Mexico, where it is building new land. Last summer the New Orleans District of the Corps of Engineers announced it would study changing the ratio of Mississippi to the Atchafalaya with an eye to diverting more water and sediment to the Atchafalaya.

It should be noted that the Corps built the Old River Control Structure to keep the Mississippi from diverting to the Atchafalaya on its own in its effort to find a shorter, steeper route to the Gulf of Mexico.

Old River Control Structure

All of this runs in the face of a paper published four months ago by a pair of geologists from Louisiana State University, stating that there is not enough sediment in the Mississippi to rebuild the Louisiana Coast. It’s all trapped behind dams in the Mississippi River basin, dams designed sometimes to retain floodwater in the uplands until the Mississippi and its tributaries could handle them, and built sometimes because the Corps of Engineers could and Congress approved.

Carl Pope, Executiver Director of the Sierra Club, put all this in perspective in an article at the Huffington Post. He came away from the Ecumenical Patriarch’s Eighth Religion, Science and the Environment Symposium with his own take on the state of the Mississippi River, the Missouri, the Atchafalaya, the Louisiana Coast, and New Orleans: they are all of a piece. The only way we are going to save the Louisiana Coast and New Orleans is to release the sediment, trapped behind dams on the Missouri, which supplied 60% of the mud to the Mississippi in 1900, and allow it to flow down the Mississippi/Atchafalaya and build land along the Louisiana Coast. This sediment is needed to keep up with the rise in sea level, which will come as Arctic ice melts.

To get the sediment to the coastal wetlands, something will have to be done about the levees that keep the Mississippi spilling over into the Louisiana parishes south of New Orleans. And, the river needs more room to flood north of New Orleans, where it is hemmed between levees–that protect cotton, corn, and soybeans–clear to the mouth of the Missouri River and above, where the Flood of 2008 breached agricultural levees in northern Illinois and farmers want a 500-year levee to protect their fields. New Orleans may get a 100-year levee someday.

Six months ago U.S. Geological Survey scientists noted that the Chicago region is the greatest contributor of nutrients to the Dead Zone In the Gulf of Mexico. I wrote about how that came to be. When canal builders excavated the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848, they cut through the low divide that separates drainage to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico from drainage to Lake Michigan. The divide is located several miles outside of Chicago.  In 1907 the City of Chicago dredged the Chicago Sanitary Canal through the divide to carry the city’s sewage to the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. This is how nutrients get from the Chicago region to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Chicago Portage, the divide between drainages to the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Michigan

Well, it’s a two-way street. What allows nutrients to flow south can allow Silver Carp to swim north to the Great Lakes.

Last spring when the Mississippi was flooded and the gates were open at Lock and Dam 26 at Alton, Illinois, fishing for Silver Carp was excellent.

JoAnn Fastoff has an excellent article in the Chicago Examiner about the need to keep Silver Carp out of the Great Lakes.

The Asian carp or silver carp or bigheaded carp is an invasive species indigenous to India and China. In 1973 fish farmers imported and stocked carp to control phytoplankton, algae, in their ponds. The phytoplanktons are microscpic plants–food for larval fish, native mussels, and zooplankton–that drift in the well-lit surface of a lake. Within a few years six state, federal, and private fish hatcheries were raising carp. By the end of th edecade municipal sewage lagoons were stocking the fish. By 1980 they had escaped into the nation’s rivers and lakes, where they reproduced and increased their range exponentially throughout the Mississippi River Basin.

The carp scoop plankton from the surface of a lake, competing with native fishes that rely on plankton for food: gizzard shad, bigmouth buffalo, and paddlefish.

Ironically, a fish that was introduced to control algae led to the production of more algae. The carp feed on algae, excrete nitrogen and phosphorous nutrients, which produce more algae. The also feed on zooplankton, reducing the number and size of plankton that would feed on algae; hence more algae and less oxygen in the waterways.

Silver carp swim in schools, just below the surface of the water, and when disturbed, jump. Noisy outboard motors upset them. They leap into the boats, often damaging them and knocking the boater silly, leaving behind slime, scales, and feces. They are set to cross the barriers between the Mississippi  and the Great Lake Basins. They have reached the electric fence in the Chicago Sanitary Canal. They are in the Des Plaines River, adjacent to the Canal, and should it flood, the carp could spill over into the Canal.

Lock #8, Illinois and Michigan Canal, Aux Sable Creek, Illinois

Or, during a heavy rain, they could sneak through culverts that connect the Illinois and Michigan Canal to the Chicago Sanitary Canal .

Potential sites for generating turbines in the Mississippi, the Atchafalaya, and Red Rivers in Louisiana, a graphic by Free Flow Power, from the Baton Route Advocate.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioon has issued 35 preliminary permits to 4 companies to install electricity generating turbines in the Mississippi, Atachafalaya, and Red Rivers in Louisiana. The FERC permitting process takes about five years, which means the turbines will not start producing electricity for another two or three years. FERC will hold hearings in New Orleans this week to examine the impact of the turbines on fish, navigation, and the environment. Will the blades chew up fish? Will the turbines disrupt navigation? And, maintaining the navigation channel is the Corps primary responsibility on the river.

Free Flow Power, one of the companies, will  complete a series of tests by October 2010 that will send fish “inject fish into a tube and through turbine blades at varying speeds. The tests begin in January.

Free Flow wants to install 180, 000 turbines, six feet in diameter, in the Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans. The system of 26 locks and dams on the river north of Alton, Illinois have turned the Upper Mississippi into a series of pools, where there is not enough current to turn the turbines.

South of Alton, the Mississippi is a free flowing river that has been channelized. The Corps of Engineers has set wing dams or dikes in the river perpendicular from the bank to speed the current and direct it to the navigation channel, which is at least nine feet deep. In short the river south of Alton runs fast and deep, a good place for turbines. Click on my April 29 post for more information.

The river bends in a deep horseshoe at Plaquemine, Louisiana, the possible site for turbines.

Mississippi River at Plaquemine, Louisiana

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may ban commercial fishing of all sturgeon, the endangered pallid sturgeon and the common shovelnose sturgeon. Fish and Wildlife put the pallid Sturgeon on the endangered list in 1990.

Those of us who love caviar have driven the harvest of shovelnose sturgeon from 6,600 pounds in 1995 to 23,000 pounds in 2007, when its roe or eggs were getting $80 a pound.

There is a problem here: the young pallid sturgeon can be mistaken for an adult shovelnose. If its caught and turned into caviar, that’s one less pallid to grow to adulthood and breed more sturgeon.

Biologists release Pallid Sturgeon

Sturgeons spend most of their lives in fast-moving, muddy rivers. But they breed in quiet side channels near sand or gravel bars.

Duck Island Side Channel at the Confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers

In its attempt to maintain a viable nine-foot navigation channel and to keep the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers from adopting side channels as the navigation channel, the Corps built closing dams across the head of side channels. The closed channels silted in. The pallid sturgeon lost breeding places.

Confluence, Columbia Bottoms, Long Dike on right

At the Confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi, a long dike directs the Missouri current into the Mississippi to the right of the dike.

Long Dike at the Confluence

The Corps of Engineers on the Missouri and Mississippi have been working to restore side channels to the rivers. The Corps began cutting notches in dikes to allow water to flow through side channels, keeping them open for sturgeon and other fish looking for a quiet place. The anglers follow.

Notched Dike at the Confluence

Fresh Marshes, Bayou Carencro, Terrebonne Basin

It has been almost twenty years since President George H.W. Bush pledged “No net loss of wetlands.”

This year Louisiana will have, for the first time in a very long time, “no net loss of wetlands.” Louisiana has a surplus and much of it is going into wetland restoration, 4,000 acres restored in 2009.

Bayou Rigolettes, Barataria Landbridge Project

This year folks working on restoring the Barataria Landbridge, deposited 1,800 acres of soil behind a concrete wall designed to keep the new soil from eroding. The marshes in the landbridge lies between Barataria Bay and the cypress forests that protect populated areas to the north. Think New Orleans. They are a major speed bump that hurricanes have to cross. A year ago they took the punch out of Gustav before it hit Houma. That is wetlands as infrastructure.

Pelicans on the Bayou Rigolettes Concrete Wall

Kerry St. Pe of the Barataria-Terrebonne Estuary Program acknowledged that the state broken even on wetland loss, but noted that so much is gone that, possibly, the rate of loss in declining.

Still, Louisiana may have gained 4,000 acres of wetlands, but it also lost 4,000 acres of wetlands or 6 square miles. Not enough to make up for the 230 square miles of wetlands lost to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, it regulated sewage produced in our houses and businesses. It did not regulate water that washes off our streets and farm fields. What washes off our farm fields in the Midwest ends up in the Gulf of Mexico.  Freshwater is lighter than salt water. When it flows to the gulf, it floats on top of the salt water. Normally, gulf winds stir the two together, but, setting aside hurricanes, summer winds in the Gulf are light and the stirring does not happen. Algae bloom in the freshwater, dies, and decays, sucking the oxygen out of the water, creating a Dead Zone, a low oxygen zone that fish, which swim cannot cross, and kills fish that cannot.

Hieser Slough, Iowa

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Natural Resources Conservation Service announced that the agencies will provide $325 million over four years to farmers in Arkansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.  This will help the farmers implement conservation measures to retain nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers, in their fields, keep the runoff out of the Ohio and Mississippi and therefore out of the Gulf of Mexico. The dense stand of trees that lines both sides of Hieser Slough, which runs between Iowa farm fields and the Mississippi,  soaks up nutrients, which might otherwise flow to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.

Timbalier Island at the Gulf of Mexico

Many farmers plow and fertilize their fields right up to the edge of sloughs that run through their fields, allowing nutrients to run directly into the slough and then to the river. The narrow, broken lines of trees, like that which lines Fish lake, are not enough to absorb the nutrients that farmers spread on their fields.

In addition, farmers have laid drain tiles under their fields to to lower the water table and speed water off their crops. In this way the roots reach down deep to the lowered water table during the dry season, making for stronger crops. During the Flood of 1993 hydrologists were stunned at the speed with which all that rain that fell on the Mississippi Basin drained off the tile-drained fields, in the uplands and the bottomlands, and to the river. Finally, streams like Fountain Creek,  which gather water and nutrients from the uplands and flow across the Mississippi floodplain, are channelized between levees from their exit from the uplands to the river. They gather deliver their water and nutrients directly to the river.

Fountain Creek, Monroe County, Illinois, 1993

In Illinois and Iowa Trees Forever is taking applications from farmers, who want to participate in the Conservation Buffer Demonstration Project, which seems to be a separate project from the USDA project. Farmers can receive up to $3,000 to build riparian buffers along the streams that edge their fields, bio-retention cells, and rain gardens. The funding for this program comes from a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant to Trees Forever.

1890 Map of the Confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers

In 1890 the Confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers was a maze of islands and sloughs, many of which have become attached to the mainland.

The Confluence with Mobile Island in the distance

On Monday the St. Louis County Planning Commission approved, unanimously, the rezoning of a 377-acre site in Spanish Lake, Missouri near the end of the I-270 bridge over the Mississippi.  This the first step in a long list of hoops  the construction of a casino and entertainment complex on site will have to jump through. I figure the complex will go near the top of Wilson Island Bend on the map.

It will be huge and  include a casino, convention center, a theater, hotel, sports bar, buffet, stores, and 18-hole golf course, a wind farm, and paving for 8,000 parking spaces and will be adjacent to the Columbia Bottoms Conservation Area. The developer is Pinnacle Entertainment of Las Vegas, which also owns a complex at Lemay south of St. Louis.

Columbia Bottoms has a long history.

French traders from New Orleans, Pierre Laclede and August Chouteau, establish St. Louis in 1764 ten miles south of the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers shortly after the French handed Louisiana over to the Spanish. Four years later Spanish troops built a fort in the uplands, overlooking the confluence. The area became known as Spanish Pond. Today, both the uplands and Columbia Bottoms lie in the suburb of Spanish Lake.

Jacques Marcellin Ceran de Hault de Lassus de St. Vrain immigrated to America in 1794, settled at Spanish Pond, and purchased large tracks of land on the bottoms. He died in 1818, but even in 1868, fifty years after his death, Pitzman’s plat map of St. Louis County shows J. de St. Vrain owning much of the land on Columbia Bottoms, the floodplain at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.

In the years before the Missouri Department of Conservation purchased 4,314 acres on the bottoms in 1997, what wetlands existed had been drained and turned over to agriculture. A flood protection levee kept out all by the biggest floods. The biggest flood, the Flood of 1993, overtopped the levee and washed in sand and debris.

The Department of Conservation has begun to restore what were once cornfields into a mosaic of shallow wetlands, bottomland forests, prairie, and croplands, all designed to attract resident and migratory wildlife.

Slough on Columbia Bottoms

In 2002 the department began constructing roads, a river access, hiking trails, and a viewing stand at the confluence to attract people to the refuge. The department allows hunting, fishing, and trapping during the proper seasons and with proper permits.

Hiking trails lace the refuge. In some cases, hikers have to share the trails with bikers. However, the best, those along the Missouri River are for hikers only. Then there is the unofficial trail to the right of the paved trail as you approach the viewing platform. It goes along the Mississippi, far enough to see the tip of Duck Island, where Bald Eagles nest. Have a look: you will find the nest in the tree at the very tip of the island.

The Unofficial Trail along the Mississippi

An 8,000 car parking lot next to a wildlife refuge? A wind farm next to a wildlife refuge? Do birds and wind mix? Airplanes and birds don’t mix, so how do birds and windmills mix? A casino next to the Confluence of our two great rivers? What if we have a repeat of 1993? It’s possible. Of course it will all be behind tall levees, so why have it on the river at all?

Wind farm near Leroy, Illinois.

Site of the Dam across Bayou la Loutre

MRGO, constructed in 1965 as a short cut from the Gulf of Mexico to the Port of New Orleans,  has been officially closed for several weeks now. It will remain a factor in the landscape for a long time, until a second closure is made at Bayou Bienville, close to New Orleans, and until the cypress forests and fresh and brackish marshes the canal destroyed are restored. A very tall order.

MRGO at Shell Beach

In the meantime anglers are finding good catches for speckled trout, white trout, red fish, and drum on the inland side of the dam. The fish are grazing for the small critters that attach themselves to the instant reef the dam became.

Fishing on the gulf side of the dam, however, is not so good. It’s a dead zone, oxygen-deprived water 40 feet deep, which fish that can swim avoid, and in which fish that can’t die.

And another thing, the dam seems to have disrupted the way the tides flow though the marshes.

Chartre Island Side Channel

You can find directions to the hike to Fort Chartres Island at twotanktours.com/StLouisTours.html. Download the Bluff Road tour. The cost is $7. It covers the American Bottom, the great Mississippi River Floodplain in Monroe and Randolph Counties in Illinois. It also includes a hike of the Fults Hilltop Prairie, a rare ecosystem on top of the bluffs.

History buffs know Fort de Chartres for the reconstructed eighteenth century French fort. Hunters, anglers, trappers, hikers, and birders know it for its woods, fields, and wetlands. Illinois Historic Preservation Agency owns 1,219 acres between the fort and the river. The agency limits deer and turkey hunters to muzzle-loading firearms and bow and arrows. Duck hunters may use modern shotguns.

The French constructed the fort on a side channel of the Mississippi, which filled with silt by the middle of the nineteenth century, attaching Fort de Chartres Island to the mainland. The Fort de Chartres Side Channel runs between the batture lands and a second, unnamed island.

There is an exhibit in the museum at the fort, which illustrates the changes in the river at the fort.

Dike across the Fort Chartres Side Channel

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the St. Louis District of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built wing dams, rock dikes set perpendicular to the bank, along the Mississippi to scour a deeper navigation channel.

At Fort de Chartres Island, the engineers built wing dams that directed the navigation channel to the Missouri side of the river and directed the river’s sediment behind the wing dams, creating, first a sand bar, then a willow island, and finally a timber island that reached the level of the mainland. The Fort de Chartres side channel ran between the timber island and Fort de Chartres Island.

Unnamed Island

In addition silt began clogging the side channel and it filled with vegetation. However, floods, like the Floods of 1993 and 2008 can scour the sediment and vegetation from the channel and return water to it.

The Fort de Chartres side channel is one of twenty-three remaining on the Mississippi River.  The St. Louis District and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources have made plans to restore the channel for the benefit of the pallid sturgeon, an endangered fish. The engineers would introduce more water into the side channel by making notches in the dikes to allow water to flow through the channel, dredging sediment from it, and installing hard points—mini-dikes that scour deep holes for fish. The plans, however, are on hold.

Last week I returned to Fort Chartres Island with the plan to hike across the closing dam, and cross the island to the edge of the the river. Mike and I wandered around the island for 45 minutes and never found a clear path to the river.

As we turned to leave, we scared a snake into a tree and the snake scared us. I normally don’t do snakes. But this one was small, in the tree, and just as scared as I was.

Chartre Snake