Drop in Big Muddy roils nation's midsection

PIERRE, S.D. -- The Big Muddy is fast turning into the Big Empty. The Missouri River is running out of water.

Montana and the western halves of South Dakota and North Dakota remain locked in a drought that in some parts of the region is heading into a seventh consecutive year. The river that millions of people rely on for electricity, drinking water, irrigation, shipping, and recreation is drying up.

''There's a lot of mountains with no snow," Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana said at a recent meeting of federal, state, and tribal officials from the eight states that make up the Missouri River Basin.

This year, he said, looks to be worse than the past six. ''This has been some time in coming, and it's probably going to be around for a little while," he said.

Oahe Reservoir, the giant body of water that stretches for more than 100 miles upstream from the dam at Pierre, dropped to a record low last fall. The surface is down 44 feet from its peak in the late 1990s, when wind would slop water over the top of emergency spillway gates.

Now, the water is more than a mile of dry land away from those same tall, steel gates. Where anglers once pursued trophy walleye, hunters now send their dogs in pursuit of pheasant.

''Roughly half of that lake is gone today," said Wayne Nelson-Stastny, a fishery biologist for the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks.

Utility officials have raised rates for electricity because the hydropower dams on the river are generating two-thirds of their usual capacity. Coal-fired and nuclear plants need cool water from the river to meet environmental regulations and run efficiently. There is serious talk about the potential for power shortages and blackouts.

Meanwhile, communities are spending millions of dollars to relocate water-supply pipes that extend into the river. Some boat ramps are closed, and wildlife departments have spent millions to extend and relocate those that remain open to preserve access to still-beautiful lakes. Some agricultural irrigators have given up chasing water and have shut off their pumps. And because not enough water is flowing into the reservoirs in the spring to match demand for power generation and navigation, fish reproduction has suffered.

Some species of fish, especially rainbow smelt, a small finger-sized fish that is an important food source for game fish such as walleye and northern pike, lay their eggs in very shallow water. If the water level goes down, the fish eggs are exposed to air and die.

The commercial barge season was cut short by 47 days last year, the most ever, and will probably be shorter this year. Unless the drought breaks in the next year, officials say, it's probably there will be no shipping on the Missouri River in 2006.

The potential impact doesn't end there. The Missouri feeds into the Mississippi River just north of St. Louis, and it helps supply enough water for barges to negotiate an especially difficult segment of the latter waterway. As the Missouri's flow lessens, potential trouble looms for shipping on the much busier Mississippi, from the grain mills of Minnesota to the world port at New Orleans.

The Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the river by controlling the water releases through six dams, recently added a term to its official lexicon: national drought emergency.

''This has only happened once in more than 100 years of record keeping on the Missouri River, in the drought of the 1930s," said Paul Johnston, a spokesman in the Corps' Omaha, Neb., district office.

A foretaste of the current conditions occurred two years ago, when a fertilizer shipment ran aground near Jefferson City, Mo. Shipping was shut down for a day on the lower Mississippi after a federal judge's order in an environmental lawsuit temporarily reduced water flow in the Missouri.

A few days before Thanksgiving that year, the people of Fort Yates, N.D., awoke to dry taps. Because the river had fallen so low, the local water system no longer could draw water.

Schools, businesses, and the hospital shut down in the remote community, headquarters for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Dialysis patients had to be quickly moved to Bismarck for care. Portable toilets and bottled water were trucked in, and Governor John Hoeven called out the National Guard to help.

''It's sad, when you go up to a faucet in the morning, turn it on, and there's nothing there," tribal chairman Charles Murphy said. A temporary intake pipe was quickly installed, but a permanent solution will cost an estimated $35 million.

''It cost us over $3 million for that problem. Five days, $3 million," Murphy said. ''People suffered, and they don't want this crisis again."

The drought continues. The High Plains are bare of snow again this winter, and snow pack is at two-thirds of normal levels in the Rocky Mountains of Montana and Wyoming.

The giant reservoirs on the river normally have 57 million acre-feet of water in storage, but they are down to about 35 million acre-feet. An acre-foot covers an acre of ground with a foot of water

The Corps' management of the river's flow depends on an annual weather cycle. Spring rains and mountain snowmelt replenish the reservoirs. There are larger releases of water from the reservoirs during the hotter, drier months of summer and fall when there is greater demand for electricity and the downstream stretch of the river needs more water for barges.

In a normal year, about 25 million acre-feet of runoff flows back into the river system. In 2003, runoff was 17.6 million; last year, it was 16.6 million.

Scientists have calculated that since 1900 runoff into the river fell below 20 million acre-feet 29 times, including five of the past six years.

The three big reservoirs on the river -- Fort Peck in Montana, Garrison in North Dakota, and Oahe in South Dakota -- are the largest storage lakes in the nation managed by the Corps. In the past four years, they have fallen by about 30 feet.

That has reduced electricity production from the hydropower dams. The Western Area Power Administration markets that low-cost power to 300-plus customers. They include municipal utilities, rural cooperatives, tribal governments, irrigation districts, federal and state agencies, and public utility districts that serve about 1.5 million industrial, business, farm, and household accounts.

The power administration raised its rates for the region by an average of 15.6 percent last year, largely because of the continuing drought. The federal agency ran deficits the previous three years, because of low generation and high costs for purchasing replacement power, and faced the same problem in 2004. Generation last year was 65 percent of normal.

Not only did the administration have to buy power on the market to fulfill its contracts; it lost revenue, because it could not sell surplus power.

''My perspective is that too little attention has been given to the economic value hydropower provides to South Dakota and the region," said Jeff Nelson, general manager for East River Electric Power Cooperative in Madison, S.D. It distributes electricity to many of the local rural cooperatives.

Further complicating the river's management are requirements of the Endangered Species Act, which was decades away from becoming law when the dams were built half a century ago. In the past year the Corps began constructing sandbars in the river where birds can nest, to help two rare species, the interior least tern and the piping plover.

The Corps also constructed spawning areas for the pallid sturgeon, a species of fish protected by the federal act.

For three decades, upstream and downstream states have been battling with each other and with the Corps over the river's management.

Those past fights begin to look small when declining water flow is expected to meet so many needs.

Governors and tribal leaders want environmental regulations and species protection to be balanced against the need for water for communities and businesses.

''I am committed to work with all in the basin," said Brigadier General William Grisoli, commander for the Corps' Northwest Division, which includes the Missouri River. ''Anything we can do to conserve water, we will."