Feds Buying Up Flooded Farmland; Soros In On It
June 30, 2011 @ 3:07 pm
There are folks who are confused as to how the situation with regards to the Missouri River dams could be the fault of the Army Corps of Engineers. After all, isn’t the amount of rainfall an Act of God?
This is not a FLASH flooding dynamic. This isn’t happening because it rained three feet in 24 hours. The largest factor in this flooding is the runoff coming from the melting of the snowpack in the Rocky Mountains.
The snowpack is precisely measured and the number of acre-feet of water that will be drained into the Missouri River basin each spring is a precisely known value. If you don’t believe me, pull up the website for ANY ski resort.
They will have DETAILED snowpack depth data updated on a near-daily basis. One could work up usable data based just off of the ski resorts – but we also have frequent and detailed snowpack measurements coming from the National Forests and National Parks.
I am hard-pressed to think of a meteorological dataset that has the precision, reliability and lead time that the runoff from the snowpack has.
The Army Corps of Engineers knew to the acre-foot how much water was coming, and when it would arrive (summer tends to happen at roughly the same time each year).
Knowing that we had a RECORD snowpack this year, the ACoE should have opened the Missouri dam system up starting early in the spring so as to gently and gradually draw-down the reservoirs and give each dam system enough slack to absorb the snowpack runoff.