South Dakota Public Broadcasting

Officials Monitor Dakota Dunes Outlook

2011 Missouri River Flood - 05/31/2011

By Jenifer Jones

Officials are working to stay on top of what they’re calling a rapidly changing situation on the Missouri River. Inundation maps show most residential areas of Dakota Dunes will flood, and Governor Daugaard says citizens need to prepare for the worst.

Joe Lowe is the incident commander running unified command in Dakota Dunes.

"Our goal here is quite clear for us and that is to protect this community and the infrastructure and the businesses in this community," Lowe says. "To that end we are making good progress toward our tactical objectives in raising the levees which will hold the water back."

Officials plan to raise the levees to the eleven hundred foot level, two feet higher than the water is expected to rise. Paul Boyd is with the Omaha district of the Corps of Engineers. He says the Corps normally evacuates water from the system in the fall to prepare for possible scenarios. But snowpack and rain have changed everything.

"Because of the flows this year which are nothing that any of us have ever seen in the Missouri River Basin before, we’re at the complete capacity, almost at the complete capacity for the system right now," Boyd says. "I want to stress that we did meet those goals last year, it’s just that these flows are something that are very very hard to forecast and we are doing our absolute best to manage them with the minimum of impacts to folks along the system."

U.S. Senator John Thune says after the flooding ends he expects an analysis of the Army Corps of Engineers, but for now the focus needs to be on the fight ahead.

"There will be a lot of hard questions asked, and there will be questions they have to answer. I think in the near term the focus needs to be on responding to the crisis, dealing with the emergency as best we can, putting the fire out so to speak, and we will do the after action analysis when we get that opportunity," Thune says. "But for right now I think the main thing is to do everything we can to prepare, make sure that we’re ready to respond as the next weeks come upon us, and then we’ll try and get those answers for the future so this sort of thing never happens again."

As Dakota Dunes residents continue to brace for record levels on the Missouri River, officials are asking the public to stay away from the area.