A soggy summer awaits along the Missouri River

[xchrom]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MISSOURI_RIVER_FLOODING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-06-18-15-30-46

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- It isn't so much the amount of water churning its way down the Missouri River that has people along the nation's longest waterway on edge. It's how long all that water will stick around.

The annual "spring rise" on the Missouri will last deep into this soggy summer, as a torrent of early season rains and winter snowpack flows through wide-open gates of South Dakota's Gavins Point Dam upriver and toward the confluence with the Mississippi River. The Missouri might start to crest soon, but it won't start to fall until August or later.

That constant pressure on the network of levees that protect farmland, roads, small towns and big cities from a river running well outside its banks is what worries folks downriver most as the high water heads south toward Kansas City and east toward St. Louis.

"The length of the flood will test levees like they've never been tested before," Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said. "You're going to see levees which in essence may be tall enough, but not strong enough."

[SpiralHawk]

1. Nuclear Mutant Turds coming America's way...

With the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant spitting and sputtering and oozing its poisonous nuclear radiation into the Missouri River just above Omaha, and the overwhelmed Omaha sewage system dumping 6 million gallons of raw sewage a day into the River, along the the ag effuluvia of GMO crops and Roundup herbicide, everyone downstream on the Missouri and the Mississippi (and eventually the Gulf of Mexico) can anticipate a summer of NUCLEAR MUTANT TURDS floating through the Heartland.