Could 2011 Missouri River flooding have been prevented?

Great Debates
1

This kind of flew under my radar, but now that there are nuclear power plant involved (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/us/21flood.html), I’ve taken interest.

Apparently, the US Army Corps of Engineers is being blamed for mismanagement of water budgets in Montana/North Dakota for the flooding that has threatened nuclear power plants that in Nebraska that have been built along the Missouri River.

The local opinion would have one believe that the Corps has mismanaged the way flood control is supposed to work. Yet further research indicates that it would take an Act of Congress to change the way the the Upper Missouri River (Mississippi, depending on the technicalities of nomenclature) is managed. See http://www.nwd-mr.usace.army.mil/rcc/reports/mmanual/MasterManual.pdf.

This strikes me as another Katrina-like scenario: people with personal investment blaming the government for Corps for missteps, but management failures seem less evident to me than structural failures.

Can anyone explain what is going on, and if these claims of mismanagement are justified?

2

Lawsuits over this have been going on for many years and now:

Note:

Land value loss alone for which the government was found liable was estimated to be around $10 million by lower courts. Attorneys for the landowners had estimated that total damages could exceed $300 million. Total damages across the Missouri River basin in 2011 were estimated at around $2 billion, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

This was by the The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, so only the Supreme Court could change the results.

3

Surely the Army Corps of Engineers could have stopped the heavy rain and snow in the Rocky Mountains that led to this flooding. “Hang them all”, I say.