St. Johns Bayou basin trying to step out of New Madrid floodway shadows

NEW MADRID, Mo. -- When it rains within a 480-square-mile area in Southeast Missouri -- in towns such as Commerce, Charleston, Sikeston and East Prairie -- water trickles down a vast matrix of ditches and canals, through narrow flood gates at New Madrid and spills into the Mississippi River.

Under normal circumstances, the watershed system keeps cities, highways, farmland and wildlife areas well-drained and healthy.

But when the river on the other side of the gates becomes so high they have to be closed, water can back up into the St. Johns Bayou Basin Drainage District with nowhere to go, damaging infrastructure and devastating residents.

The St. Johns Bayou Basin Drainage District board members believe the area has been overshadowed by, and confused with, the New Madrid floodway. It is difficult to have federal officials who control the system and lawmakers who could influence them understand their needs, they said.

"They hear 'St. Johns' and their eyes just glaze over," said board member Scott Matthews during a Feb. 29 board meeting.

The gravity flow gates in the setback levee in New Madrid. (Laura Simon)

"This is where all the people live, this is where businesses are, this is interstate highways," said board president Ted Medlin. "Over here [in the floodway] they have virtually no one living here. They virtually have no infrastructure; it's farmland."

Medlin said farmland is important to the roughly 35,000 bayou basin residents. Most board members are farmers. But urban issues that arise, such as septic and water well contamination and sediment damage to drainage systems, are faced only by the drainage district.

After historic flooding in 2011, more than $11.5 million in cropland and drainage-ditch damage was sustained in the bayou basin, according to Natural Resources Conservation Service estimates. The neighboring New Madrid floodway was inundated with water after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers breached the front-line levee in three places as part of an emergency plan that had been established in 1927. More than 130,000 acres were flooded. But the floodway was drained and crops were planted long before land in the bayou basin -- more than twice the size of the floodway -- emerged from the floodwaters, board members said. Landowners in the floodway understand periodic flooding is deeded to them. Bayou basin residents are supposed to be protected, Medlin said.

The 2011 floods had statewide implications, too, Medlin said. Interstate 55 and U.S. 61 were partially submerged.

"If those two roads are down, there is no north-south traffic between St. Louis and Memphis," Medlin said.

When the New Madrid flood gates were built 60 years ago at the convergence of the Farrenburg Levee and the Setback Levee to protect the bayou basin, residents were promised a pumping station to remove floodwaters that could become impounded by the levees.

The pumping station is tied up in the stalled St. Johns Bayou and New Madrid Floodway project. The latest delay in the corps' plan to close a 1,500-foot gap in the levee system is the lack of an environmental-impact statement for public review. Despite ongoing pressure by legislators and stakeholders, the public has been waiting for the statement since 2008. The project as a whole began in the 1950s.

Noting the needs of the area, Amy Salveter, Fish and Wildlife Service field supervisor, said in a Jan. 18 letter to the corps that she strongly advocated a modified plan to solely address the protection needs of communities and infrastructure in the St. Johns Bayou. Separating the bayou project from the New Madrid floodway would avoid "another exhaustive, repetitive cycle of rebuttal between the federal agencies and most efficiently and effectively address the most pressing, long-standing flood-control issues in the project area," she said.

"That's the first time that's been acknowledged anywhere in writing, in our opinion," Matthews said.

The corps has been working with the wildlife service and the Environmental Protection Agency to draft an environmental-impact statement. The wildlife service and EPA are serving in an advisory capacity, with the corps ultimately responsible for determining when the impact statement will be released.

Missouri's U.S. senators, Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Roy Blunt, met with corps, wildlife service and EPA representatives Feb. 27; they discussed the path toward a final resolution. Both legislators -- and former congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson -- have strongly criticized the corps and the ongoing delays in the project. After the meeting, Blunt and McCaskill released statements saying the corps committed to providing them with a progress report by March 15.

Late last week, corps spokesman Eugene Pawlik said by email the legislators had requested an update but "a report is not being generated."

salderman@semissourian.com

388-3646

Pertinent address:

New Madrid, Mo.