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Levee chairman testifies repairs should come quickly

The head of the Missouri Levee and Drainage District Association has testified before a U.S. House subcommittee hearing about Missouri River flooding. Tom Waters, a seventh-generation farmer, who says farmers livelihoods have been lost, “It just trickles through the whole economy of the state. But when you put Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska in there, the whole Midwest, it really will affect food production and trickle through the United States economy. I really believe that.”

Waters says flood control used to be a highly-engineered system but over the past 20 years, it has been used to do supersized science experiments for birds and fish, “We’ve reached a tipping point. We can no longer to continue to conduct failed experiment after failed experiment at the expense of peoples’ lives and livelihoods. And I say lives because people have died.”

Waters says he expects the Missouri River to continue to be above flood stage into winter, “With over 100 levees breached along the Missouri River flooding’s going to continue to be a problem. It’s going to take a long time to recover these levees.”

He wants federal officials to act quickly to repair the levees.