This is to supplement, to some extent, terrypinder’s excellent Diary on the flooding Mississippi and particularly its impact on the state of Missouri, and the Meramec River, one of the longest free-flowing waterways in the state:
By way of background, as Terry’s Diary explains, the Mississippi River is experiencing a record flood completely out of season:
The Mississippi River is flooding in a big way right now, at the wrong time of year, and is forecasted to match or break 22-year-old crest records over the next few days. Meteorologists are calling it “insane.”
Over the next three to four days, the Mississippi is predicted to reach a crest height of 49.7 feet at Chester, Illinois, one of several locations where the National Weather Service records data about the river. As of Tuesday afternoon, the river has already risen to 40.8 feet. According to Taylor Trogdon, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Memphis, that is an “absolutely remarkable” forecast.
According to Missouri governor Jay Nixon, the flooding is expected to bring the Mississippi to its highest crest ever recorded, exceeding the highest level of the “great flood” of 1993. Thirteen people in Missouri had died in the floods as of this morning and the economic damage is absolutely staggering:
Several roads were blocked into the tourist mecca of Branson, where nearly 200 families were asked to evacuate voluntarily and the Red Cross opened a shelter on the Branson Strip.
At Rockaway Beach near Branson, residents said the flooding, which peaked Monday night, was the worst they'd ever seen.
"I'm usually pretty good about coming up with a game plan, and yesterday, literally my mind shut down, because I didn't know what to do," Rick Pickren, owner of White River Trading Co., an antique store, told NBC station KYTV of Springfield on Tuesday.
The National Weather Service says that 12 million people nationwide are living in areas where there are flood warnings in effect. Nineteen Federal levees along the Mississippi are currently in danger of being breached. The implications if that happens, are, putting it mildly, severe:
"If a levee was to give way, the entire Mississippi would flood out," Kevin Roth, lead meteorologist at The Weather Channel, told NBC News. "It would flood fields, homes and anything else in its path."
This almost-unheard-of high water level would continue to affect towns and cities as it flowed downstream, likely reaching St. Louis on Thursday or Friday and New Orleans next week, according to Roth.
One levee was actually breached yesterday, in West Alton Missouri, twenty miles North of St. Louis. And while the rainfall in the area has stopped, the river continues to rise. It is expected to crest on New Year’s Day.
It’s not only the Mississippi that is flooding to record levels, but the Missouri, the Meramec, and twenty-seven other rivers in the region:
The Mississippi isn’t the only river flooding. A series of major storms over the weekend have sent torrents of rain down over the central United States, pushing 400 rivers to flood across the region, the Post reports. Of these, 30 were in “major flood stage,” which the National Weather Service defines as “extensive inundation of structures and roads” requiring “significant evacuations of people and/or transfer of property to higher elevations.”
The Meramec winds through about 200 miles of Missouri before it joins the Mississippi about twenty miles south of the famous “Gateway Arch. ” Yesterday, flooding in the Meramec River inundated a sewage treatment plant, leading its owner to cut off power for safety reasons. As a result, sewage that would normally be treated is now spilling into the river:
Untreated sewage could be flowing into the Meramec River for days as officials wait for the water to recede from a flooded Fenton treatment plant.
Sewage has been flowing into the river since Monday night after floodwater disabled the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District’s Fenton plant, and the district spent much of Tuesday trying to save another plant in Valley Park.
“We’re anticipating it is going to be a loss,” MSD Executive Director Brian Hoelscher told the Post-Dispatch in an interview. “Based on the current projections and our ability to react, we’re anticipating the entire plant is going to go underwater.
The Fenton plant was built in 1988 and has never flooded before. The plant sits ten miles upstream from a water company plant (Missouri American Water) that relies on water from the river to serve a substantial portion of its 1,000,000 St Louis County consumers. While floodwater in general is assumed to be contaminated, a spokesman for the Sewer District advised people to avoid the water near Fenton “now more than ever.”
You can smell the sewage in parts of town. Now the Meramec River is mixed with millions of gallons of raw sewage. Untreated wastewater began spilling into the river after flooding shutdown the Metropolitan Sewer District’s Fenton treatment plant. It treats nearly seven million gallons every day, but an MSD spokesman says it was treating more than three times that amount when it failed.
The impact of the disastrous flooding on the Fenton sewage treatment plant is but one example of the overlooked, unfathomable consequences of these types of severe climate events, revealing gaping vulnerabilities in our society and infrastructure that often aren’t apparent until it’s too late:
The treatment plant outage has raised concerns among people like Alicia Lloyd, clean water policy coordinator for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment.
"When the sewage is going untreated into riverways, that comes from kitchen sources, bathrooms, and laundries," Lloyd said. "All that contains chemicals, detergents, bacteria, nutrients and other pollutants that are harmful to our waterways."
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Lloyd said the flooding also highlights the hazards St. Louis and its surrounding communities are likely to face from climate change, which scientists say will bring more extreme weather in the coming century.
"We need to build greater climate resiliency in the future, because this is going to continue to happen," she said.