The Missouri River flooding in Omaha, Nebraska. That is Interstate 29 underwater. Photo by Larry Geiger.
Though we usually don’t cover current events on this blog, no Lewis & Clark aficionado can ignore the incredible scale of the flooding now taking place on the Missouri River. In the past few weeks, the upper Missouri basin has received nearly a year’s worth of rainfall. In addition, the forecast snow melt runoff is 212 percent of normal across the upper portion of the river system. The result has been massive flooding across Montana, the Dakotas, and now Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri. The Gavins Point Dam floodgates near Yankton, South Dakota, are pouring out enough water to cover a football field with 156 of water every one minute.
For more of Larry Geiger’s photos of the incredible flooding, please visit his slideshow page.
Those images of I-29 are mind-boggling. I emailed a link of the photos to my husband and he just kept saying, “I-29 is UNDER WATER!!”
Here on the west coast, we’re hearing very little about the floods; on the news, it’s almost an afterthought, sort of Oh, by the way… We’d heard the details only because we have family in Iowa near the Nebraska border (my stepdaughter won’t be driving to her job in Omaha any time soon, it looks like), and other places in the Midwest.