ALTON, Ill. -- Roger Blaske's great-grandfather worked the Missouri River. So did his grandfather, as well as his dad. But last year, Blaske sold the family barges. The river was just too low.
A severe drought, now in its seventh year, is wreaking havoc up and down the Missouri, from the river's headwaters at Three Forks, Mont., to its confluence with the Mississippi River near St. Louis. One big casualty: a commercial shipping tradition that dates to Lewis and Clark.
"We've all seen droughts before -- but this one, it's serious," Blaske, 62 and retired, said while sitting on a park bench recently at a visitor center near the confluence.
What the Missouri needs most is a deluge of melted snow and rain, but Mother Nature is not cooperating. Absent that, the Senate Appropriations Committee is trying to alleviate the problem -- but members are badly split over what to do.
Nearly a third of the 28 committee members represent states that border the Missouri or have an economic stake in it, and they fall into two camps with very different interests: upstream and downstream.
"It's almost become a Hatfield-McCoy kind of fight, unfortunately," said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.).
Dorgan and two fellow upstreamers, Sens. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) and Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), want to retain more water in the upper Midwest reservoirs that were built after the Depression to control flooding and improve navigation. Over the decades, the six reservoirs, in the Dakotas, Montana and Nebraska, have become a vital regional resource, providing drinking water to many communities and spawning a lucrative fishing and boating industry.
Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) leads a downstream faction that also includes Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). They argue that holding more water in the reservoirs would end commercial navigation on the Missouri, jeopardize operations at 18 power plants and hinder shipping on the Mississippi -- one of the country's most important transportation corridors.
The Mississippi angle broadens the downstream coalition to include Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran (R-Miss.); Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate; and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).
The two sides are using hearings and legislation to duke it out. As the drought worsens, the remedies are getting more creative. Dorgan's latest idea: a federal buyout of the barge industry, which he says is worth about $8 million a year -- about a tenth of the revenue that Dorgan says the tourism industry generates on Lake Sakakawea, the Missouri River reservoir in the middle of his state.
Last year, Dorgan and Burns tried to hold back more reservoir water by adding a provision to the spending bill produced by the interior subcommittee, which the two senators control. The full committee passed the legislation, infuriating Bond. The former Missouri governor inserted language to block the provision in the veterans affairs and housing spending bill produced by the panel that he chairs. Both bills wound up on the Senate floor, with Bond eventually prevailing.
"There was a lot of fur flying," Dorgan recalled.
