It's Feast Or Famine On The Mississippi River: From Too Low Water To Major Flood

Mississippi River floodwaters surround a ballpark in
Davenport, Iowa this week has another major 
flood crests its way down the northern half of the river.

 Last autumn, long stretches of the Mississippi River were at near record low levels, thanks to drought in much of its immense drainage basin.  

Fast forward to now, and we have the opposite problem: Parts of the river are at major flood stage. 

A flood crest has been moving down the Mississippi through Minnesota and down into Iowa and has been cresting this week. 

In late April, the river crested at 15.89 feet, the highest since 2001, says ABC News. In St. Paul, Minnesota, the river reached its highest level since a substantial flood in 2019.  

The flood crest on Monday at Davenport, Iowa was the eighth highest on record for the Mississippi.  That comes just four years after an even higher crest flooded swaths of that city's downtown.  Water broke through some of flood defenses in 2019, causing enormous damage in and around downtown Davenport. 

So far, flood defenses have held around Davenport and other Iowa cities along the Mississippi. But the battle against the river has forced businesses and streets to close, and some people to evacuate homes as a precaution. It's no picnic. 

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has issued disaster proclamations for 15 counties to help residents respond to the Mississippi River flooding, says ABC. 

It looks like the Mississippi crested at Davenport on Monday and is slowly receding. There could be a second crest if heavy rains develop in the upper Midwest.  Forecasts over the next week call for moderate amounts of rain so they should be OK.

Flood warnings along the Mississippi extend southward to just north of St. Louis.  Below St. Louis, the river gets bigger, so the contribution of snow melt water in the river is less of an influence. But the water will still run high all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Heavy rains could cause flooding later in the spring and summer below St. Louis. 

The high water is disrupting and closing off barge traffic along the Mississippi in Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois and soon, possibly Missouri.  Last autumn's low water also disrupted barge traffic. 

You can't win.  

The flooding this year can mostly be blamed on snow, not rain.  The winter brought amazing amounts of snow to areas around the very upper reaches of the river and its tributaries in and near Minnesota. Duluth had its snowiest winter on record. Minneapolis had its third snowiest.  Pretty much all that snow melted in late March and April, and here we are with the resulting flood. 

If You Love Our Current Inflation Woes, You'll Love The Record Low Mississippi River Levels

The Mississippi River is so low that people can walk to 
this island in the river south of St. Louis, which is 
extremely rare. Normally, it's only accessible via boat.

 The following news actually surprised me this past week:

Large stretches of the Mississippi River are at record low levels. 

I knew that drought has afflicted swaths of the Mississippi River watershed this year, but I didn't think the droughts were the worst on record. They probably weren't, but the location of the droughts, the widespread areas affected by the droughts and their persistence really pushed the mighty Mississippi to a point that for now isn't so mighty anymore. 

The Mississippi River usually reaches its low point about this time annually, but this year the low is really low.

Says the Washington Post in an October 12 article: 

"Repeatedly over the past week, water levels have become too low for barges to float, requiring the corps to halt maritime traffic on the river and dredge channels deep enough even for barges carrying lighter than normal loads Days after a queue of stalled river traffic grew to more than 1,700 barges during emergency dredging near Vicksburg, Miss., a separate 24-hour dredging closure began Tuesday near Memphis. More dredging, which routinely costs billions of dollars a year, could be needed if barges continue to run aground."

This dredging has to continue to allow barges to pass, but still, things are way more gummed up than they ought to be, due to the low water.

This disrupts supply chains. As we've heard so much on the news lately, screwed up supply chains are one reason inflation is so nasty right now.  The low water on the Mississippi can only make this situation worse.

The river carries 60 percent of our corn and soybean exports, so you can see how this can affect food prices. Especially since agricultural exports from Ukraine are severely limited due to Russia's invasion and war crimes in that nation.  

At Memphis, the water level hit minus 10.79 feet, breaking a low water record established in 1988, another big drought year. 

For complicated reasons, river levels can be at minus levels. One instance as to how this can happen is a long standing river gauge could have established a zero level water mark decades ago.  Currents might have deepened the channel at that point, so during drought, water is still there, but is running below the zero level of the gauge. 

This low water might last awhile, too.  Forecasters expect to river level at Memphis to remain near minus 11 feet until at least November 1.  If that river doesn't rise markedly in November, it'll be too late. The northern reaches of the river, say up by Minnesota and Iowa, will freeze, so barge traffic from the farms up that way will have to stop.

The winter could lock away moisture from the river until the spring thaw. In that case the Mississippi would stay low until then. Then, because everything will be behind, the supply chains for the 2023 harvest could also be disrupted. 

Much further downstream, in Plaquemines  Parish, Louisiana, residents were warned earlier this autumn that the drinking water drawn from the Mississippi River now has elevated levels of sodium and chloride, the Washington Post reported.   This can be dangerous for people on dialysis or low sodium diets. 

The problem is that the southward river flow has weakened so much due to the low water that salt water from the Gulf of Mexico is creeping northward, forming a wedge at the bottom of the river because salt water is heavier that fresh water. 

A little rain is in the forecast for parts of the Mississippi River basin over the next week, but it will be much less than needed to add substantial runoff into the river. 

Plus, you'd need a lot of widespread rain to have a noticeable effect on the Mississippi River. You have to consider the Mississippi has big tributaries like the Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas and Illinois rivers. 

Which basically means we need a lot of heavy rain from Montana to Pennsylvania and from northern Minnesota to Louisiana.

 For people who live near the Mississippi River, the low water is quite a novelty. There's a really cool island in the river called Tower Rock. It's basically an oval shaped cliff topped with trees. Normally, you can only get there by boat.

But the river is so low, people can just walk to it without even getting their feet wet, says CNN.

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a man walking along the river spotted what appeared to be an old shipwreck.  Archaeologists think it might be the Brookhill Ferry, which carried people and horse-drawn wagons from one side of the river to the other. Newspaper archives say the ship sank during a bad storm in 1915, the Associated Press reports. 

 The novelty of walking to an island is nice, as is finding centuries old shipwrecks. But for a practical and economics standpoint, we'd better hope the Mississippi River regains its might - and fast!