An Agency of Unchecked Clout

"It's just insane," says Mark Boone, a fisheries biologist for the Missouri Department of Conservation. "It's like the rest of the world woke up, and the Corps is still asleep."

So on one hand, the federal government is paying people billions of dollars to move homes and businesses away from floodplains; on the other hand, the Corps is pushing an economic development project not only in a natural floodplain, but in an official floodway. Meanwhile, at a time when the nation is officially committed to restoring wetlands--which serve as kitchens and nurseries for countless species, filter water that ends up in faucets, and reduce flood damages by absorbing excess water--this project would destroy wetlands.

The project would also boost agricultural production in Missouri when the government is spending billions to take flood-prone farmland out of production--and billions more to prop up and bail out farmers suffering from low prices, which have been depressed by overproduction. And while an executive order by President Clinton promoted "nonstructural" approaches to reducing flood damages, this levee-and-pump project is decidedly structural."On a lot of levels, the project makes no sense," said FEMA's Witt.

The Perennial Campaign

In the beginning the Mississippi ran free, meandering around hairpin turns, changing channels like a bored teenager. It was a complex river of sloughs, sandbars and side channels, flooding across its valley every spring, nourishing thick canopies of oak, cottonwood and cypress. Its bard, Mark Twain, wrote that mankind simply "cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it Go here or Go there, and make it obey.

"The Corps of Engineers has never accepted "cannot."

Today the river has been tamed into a reliable commercial waterway by the Corps, confined within earthen levees by the Corps, straightened and shortened and simplified by the Corps. Its valley has been cleared and converted from swampland to farmland, and cities have sprouted along its banks. It has been imprisoned into a single channel, where its barges float half the nation's inland freight.It's also a sick river.

Corps levees look like ordinary hills along the riverbank, but they have severed the Mississippi from more than 90 percent of its floodplain, eliminating millions of acres of wetlands that had attracted fish, shorebirds and other wildlife. Dams and dikes that stabilized the main barge channel have degraded biologically diverse back channels. The river's water quality has deteriorated steadily, pouring pesticides into the Gulf of Mexico's oxygen-deprived "dead zone." And changes in sediment flows have depleted Louisiana's coastal marshes, which are vanishing so fast that some experts are calling for a restoration project twice the size of the Everglades mission.

The story of the Mississippi is in many ways the story of the Corps' civil works program, which has focused on the river ever since Congress inaugurated it with $75,000 in 1824. The transformation of the Mississippi reflects the can-do genius of the Corps, an energetic military organization that fortified Bunker Hill, built the Washington Monument, surveyed the West, dug the Panama Canal and supervised the Manhattan Project. (Its motto, "Essayons," is French for "Let us try.") But it also illustrates the hubris of the Corps, an agency that has historically treated nature as an enemy to be conquered, equating engineering and control with progress.

Today, its leaders speak about "working in harmony with nature," but the Corps still proudly mobilizes for its "Annual Campaign Against the Mighty Mississippi." Burton Kemp, a former Corps geologist in Mississippi, says no one should be surprised when the agency takes a militaristic approach to the environment. "I'm afraid it's not the Corps of Scientists. It's not the Corps of Biologists," he sighed.

"It's the Corps of Engineers."The Annual Campaign began in earnest after the Civil War, when a headstrong Corps general named Andrew Humphreys, fresh from losing half his division in the Union's disastrous charge at Fredericksburg, launched his equally disastrous "levees-only" policy for controlling the Mississippi. As John Barry recounted in his history, "Rising Tide," the plan was revealed as a colossal blunder in the 1927 flood, when levee breaks left nearly 1 million people homeless and 16 million acres underwater. Humphreys underestimated the power of the Mississippi, which drains two of every five drops of rain that fall on the continental United States. His levees cut off the river's outlets, so all that water squeezed between them had nowhere to go but up.

Nevertheless, Congress gave the Corps full power over the river in 1928, and the agency revised its strategy. It continued to strengthen and extend the Mississippi levees--they are now longer than the Great Wall of China--but it also built a system of reservoirs, cutoffs and diversions to ease the pressure on them. The system included the New Madrid Floodway, an emergency relief valve, 180 extra square miles of room for the river to spread out over in case of high water.

The plan called for the river to enter the floodway up in Birds Point, where the Corps would dynamite a hole in the levee, and return to its channel down in New Madrid, where the Corps left a 1,500-foot gap in the levee. The Corps executed the plan in 1937, and it helped save upstream communities such as Cairo, Ill. In 1997, the Corps again had barges loaded with explosives and ready to blow, but the upstream flood subsided just in time.