Great Missouri River Flood of 2019: Iowa Time Machine March 17, 2019

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On March 17, 2019, the Missouri River reached a record 30.2 feet in Iowa's Fremont County. Heavy rainfall and snowmelt caused flooding in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, leading to crest two full feet above the previous 2011 high in some places.

For residents of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska, flooding is hardly a new story. Yet, the 2019 inundation slotted into a long tradition of Midwestern water disasters that stretch from the 1952 floods to the “Great Flood” of 1993. The Missouri River, the longest river in North America, has been straightened, dammed, and guarded by levees, but those defenses have never eliminated risk so much as shifted it in space and time. By early 2019, the United States had already logged its wettest January through May period on record, leaving soils saturated and rivers elevated across the central states. A powerful March “bomb cyclone” brought heavy rain, blizzard conditions, and hurricane-force winds to the Plains, setting the stage for rapid snowmelt over still-frozen ground. The water could not soak in, so it ran off in torrents into tributaries and then into the Missouri, primed to push river levels past anything residents had seen in their lifetimes.

In Fremont County, the consequences of that setup arrived in a rush. On Sunday, March 17, 2019, the Missouri River reached 30.2 feet at the gauge there, overtopping and breaching levees in Iowa’s far southwestern corner and shattering the record crest set in 2011. The rising water forced evacuations in small communities like Bartlett and Thurman, where only a few hundred people lived, but where each house carried decades of family history. Local emergency managers described a river that did not creep up the bank but surged across open country, its fast current sweeping through fields and roadways with little to slow it.

When the Missouri finally dropped back below flood stage and gravel roads re-emerged from the water, the landscape of Fremont County looked familiar yet subtly altered. Sand deposits marked where currents had carved temporary channels, while damaged levees and lingering debris testified to the river’s power. #Iowa #OTD #Weather #Flood #MissouriRiver