The storm brewing outside early Tuesday evening promised to saturate Linn County further, but it was nothing compared to the tempest that broke inside the Linneus Community Center. Although officials with the Missouri Departments of Natural Resources (DNR) and Conservation (DOC) had come to offer their rationale for allowing Locust Creek to flood prime farmland here, the emotions of area landowners and strict limits upon how long any one speaker could have the floor seemed to preclude any chance of productive dialogue. To further complicate matters, the landowners were looking for a straightforward, universal solution to what the DNR and DOC officials described as a very complex problem. The State’s conservationists blamed Mother Nature for the flooding of farmers’ fields, and the landowners who depend upon cultivating that ground for their livelihood attributed responsibility to the way DNR and DOC officials have managed Locust Creek. For their part the State’s conservationists observed that the past 30 years have born witness to record rainfall and most recently, 28 floods in 24 months. When the assembled landowners asserted that all DNR and DOC needed to do was remove the log jams and grade controls (i.e., barriers) from Locust Creek, DNR District Supervisor Dan Files responded, “This isn’t just about log jams. Locust Creek drains an area that is half the size of Rhode Island.” In a follow-up interview, DOC Fisheries Biologist Greg Pitchford advised, “We have been constantly removing them [i.e., log jams] from Locust Creek in Pershing State Park since 1993. We have also tried to dynamite them, but you have to be careful because too powerful a charge will damage windows and foundations of neighboring homes. Log jam removal will be ongoing, but we can only pull the material to the side of the channel as our permits don’t allow us to completely remove that debris from the Park.” It is the contention of the conservationists that controlling the amount of water flowing down Locust Creek from the north takes more than pulling trees out of that stream, so they have been taking advantage of a naturally occurring channel that reroutes 80 percent of that water to Higgins’ Ditch and then allowing it to overflow into a 1,452 acre tract of land the State recently purchased from the Zell family. “The only way to correct this is to allow the water to spread out,” explained Pitchford Tuesday evening. The problem is that some of that flooding has threatened to extend onto property the State doesn’t own, reducing the number of acres that can be farmed and/or hunted upon by their private owners. But this conflict between the interests of the conservationists and those of the private landowners dates back to at least the 1940s, long before the area was experiencing the record precipitation it has absorbed over the past 30 years. A 2007 article written by the Sonja Hillgren Institute’s Jennifer Meyer chronicles, “In the 1940s, the creek north of Pershing Park had been straightened, widened and channeled to help ease the effects of flooding in farmers’ fields. The idea was to keep the water flowing downstream during flood season instead of spilling over its banks. The plan backfired.” Perhaps Meyer should have said, “It backwashed.” As she explained, “In the park, the stream is allowed to flow naturally, slithering south like a snake. In the spring, the creek floods and water rushes downstream, carrying deadwood and other debris along with it. When it reaches Pershing Park, the water is forced to squeeze from a 100-foot wide channel to one that is 60 feet wide, much like a funnel. The debris in the water clogs the narrower channel and jams the creek, causing floods north of the park.” While private landowners would rectify the flooding problem with a simple formula—straighten Locust Creek in Pershing Park—Meyer observed, “Channeling the creek through the park would disrupt the wet prairie, which wouldn’t receive the number of flood events it naturally should” to sustain the park’s ecosystem in its natural state. Although Meyer contends Higgins’ Ditch is “a channel a farmer had dug decades ago” for a purpose she doesn’t specify, it is now, in effect, to be used as a way to divert the flooding into land DNR has been buying to use as a flood plain.
Linn County, Mo. —
