Corps Briefs City on Flood Issues - KXNet - Bismarck/Minot/Williston/Dickinson

Corps Briefs City on Flood Issues

The city of Minot and Souris River Joint Board have asked the US Army Corps of Engineers to study the Mouse River system in the US to help develop the best plans for flood protection.
Papers were signed this week to request the help from the Corps.

District Commander Colonel Michael Price says that means the Corps will spend up to 100-thousand dollars over the next year, determining if federal money might be used to help develop flood control for the region.
Colonel Price and Division Commander Major General John Peabody met with city and state leaders over the past two days, talking about a unified plan to protect the area from the Mouse River.
Colonel Price says studies show the city would have protection against flooding to the level hit in 2011 without having to build levees to the 27,400 CFS proposed in the Mouse River Enhanced Flood Protection plan.
He says the study showed a combination of raising the level of Lake Darling Dam to increase its storage capacity, and increasing the "target flow" for the river from the current five thousand CFS to ten thousand CFS, would have made a dramatic difference in the 2011 flood.

(Col. Michael Price, US Army Corps of Engineers) "What that showed is that there are things that can be done, there are things that can be studied to reduce the risks to Minot, Sawyer, Velva, and anyone else in the Souris Basin."

That's a change of position for some officials who've said there was nothing that could have been done to prevent the flood of 2011.
But it's a position that the International Souris River Board is pursuing along with the Corps, to come up with new management rules to increase flood protection.
Today's meeting was also attended by Major General John Peabody who said he's impressed at how local leaders who've been hit hard by the flood are responding.

(Maj.Gen. John Peabody, US Army Corps of Engineers) "They're still positive, upbeat, they have an approach to find solutions and the willingness to go ahead and execute those solutions."

General Peabody and Colonel Price are off next to the Devils Lake region for the dedication of the new Tolna Coulee flood control structure.