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“MISSOURI RIVER FLOODING” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H7057-H7060 on Oct. 25, 2011.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
MISSOURI RIVER FLOODING
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 30 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it's my honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor. And before I go into my presentation, I want to go into the subject matter the gentleman from Texas has led this previous Special Order on, just as a means of discussing a way to look at victims' rights.
For me, I was caused to reexamine the situation as a victim. I had had some heavy equipment that was destroyed by vandals back in the year 1987, a year that shall live in infamy. It was in the middle of the farm crisis years. A lot of that damage was uninsured, but we did catch the perpetrators. A long, long story; it was hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. I followed through on everything, seeing myself as a victim who had an obligation to assist the prosecution as a citizen and a victim would and should. And I remember sitting in the courtroom in Sac City, Iowa, when they brought up the trial of one of the perpetrators. The bailiff announced to the court: This is the case of the State v. Jason Martin Powell. And I sat there thinking, how is it the State versus the perpetrator? I'm not in this equation. I'm not even the versus; I'm just here as a spectator. And so I began to examine what that really means. What it means is that the State and the law enforcement component, in this case the State, is the intervenor. If you have a grievance with someone, and I certainly had a grievance with the people that destroyed my equipment and nearly destroyed my business, before the law and order days, that would be settled in some other fashion, likely in some violent fashion. And if you go back a couple thousand years or 3,000 years before the law was established, like Mosaic law, or Roman or Greek law--but as law was established, it was to eliminate the vigilante component of this, and the State stepped in and intervened.
Another way of looking at it would be when everything was owned by the State. The subjects in, let's say, old Western Europe, old England, the subjects were the property of the king. The State supplanted the king. The subjects and everything they owned were the property and the ownership of the king in England, so when you see old English common law and you see how it transfers into the United States, and it becomes the State v. Jason Martin Powell, the perpetrator, convicted perpetrator, I will say, and I can say his name in the record here now, that transfer was, if you committed a crime, you shot one of the king's deer, if you murdered or assaulted one of the king's subjects, you were committing a crime against the king. So in our society when you commit a crime, you are committing a crime against the State.
I'm taking us all to this point, Mr. Speaker, because once the State is satisfied that they have established justice, the victim doesn't really have anything more to say about it. The victim is not in that equation. My position needs to be developed more than it is, but my point is if the State is going to intervene, then the State has to enforce the law, then the State has to protect the citizens adequately. And when they fail, then what's the obligation of the State? They are not ensuring us to be protected from violent crime. They're simply doing the best they can without a consequence for the State. All the way around that circle is this.
{time} 1750
Back in those years, I remember a study that was done, and that study will come to me in a moment. It was a 1995 study. In that study, they put a value on each crime. And I remember that a rape victim--they valued murder at around a million dollars; rape at about $82,000. Now, I can't imagine who would submit to rape for $82,000 dollars, but that was the quantity.
Then they also put in that study that a criminal who was loose on the street--an average criminal loose on the street--would commit $444,000 worth of crime in a year. Well, it costs about $20,000 a year to lock them up. They do $444,000 worth of damage to the society in a year. But that damage is not compensated. That comes out of crime victims in great, huge, whopping chunks of their lives, their security, and their property.
So I would just suggest that if the State were liable for all of the damage that's caused by perpetrators, we would have a more effective criminal justice system. I'm not advocating that we bring that forward in this Congress, but I just discuss that way of looking at this, how we got to the point where the State is the intervenor. Because the State is the successor to the Crown in old English common law, and a crime committed under the Crown was a crime committed against the King, because he owned everything, and it damaged his ability--even if it was the serf--to produce.
So we are now the successor philosophy, but we've forgotten this part, that victims are paying the price. The State is not paying the price. It's no longer a crime against the State, even though the State is the intervenor.
I would yield to the gentleman from Texas and thank him for presenting this. It just sparked that memory, and I wanted to put that into the Record and let you know how I think about crime victims.
Mr. AL GREEN of Texas. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I especially thank you for placing things in a proper historical context. It's greatly appreciated.
Having taught a class myself in trial simulation, one of the things that we discussed was the origin of the concept of the State. And it evolved to the extent that you've called to our attention, but it also became a ``we the people'' country. Our country is a ``we the people'' country. And sometimes if we substitute for the State ``we the people,'' because it becomes the people in many places against the defendant, and I think it's appropriate that it be the people against the defendant.
I think we as a society have some things that we will not tolerate, and, as a result, we have codified these things into laws that carry penalties with them. And these penalties, in my opinion, have to be imposed so as to maintain an orderly society.
I would mention, to my friend, this. You have said $82,000 for rape. I just have to make sure that I go on record saying I agree with you;
$82,000, I cannot imagine how someone managed to conclude that $82,000 was the worth of a person having been raped or that crime itself.
I support the notion that we must compensate victims. Victims ought to be compensated appropriately, which is one of the reasons why I have supported the Violence Against Women Act; and I'm hoping that we'll get it reauthorized, because it does establish a fund so that victims of crimes of this nature can have their perpetrators pay money into this fund so as to make sure that victims are properly compensated.
I think you and I together, today, want to make sure that the people--we the people--are heard, and we the people in the courts of this country can take the necessary steps to not only prevent but also to compensate the victims of these dastardly deeds.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Texas for making those points.
We the people have vested our authority in our government, and that's how that transfer takes place. But I remember clearly the bailiff saying, ``The State versus,'' and that rang my bell; and I looked back through history to understand the root of that.
I would point out also that the $82,000 for a rape victim, I believe, was quantified in this way--loss of work, medical treatment, psychological treatment; that kind of impact that was just simply the economic impact on her life, not the emotional impact and the trauma. But even still, to quantify that--and the Department of Justice has quantified crime also with different values. And I don't recall them well enough from that chart, but I know there's a 1992 Department of Justice study that laid some values out.
I think it would be a plus for us, even though pain and suffering and the loss of life is immeasurable in a dollar form, if we could quantify it in a way we begin to understand what crime does to society. That would be helpful if we could move down that path. It's been a long time since there's been a real broad study done in this country that laid out the complete loss of all of the crimes in the United States that are committed. I would think it's in the billions of dollars. We accept it because it's a victim here and a victim there. It's not like they're all coming together in one large group. It's scattered out across our society. And the higher the level of crime in your community, the higher your tolerance has been because of the continual incidence of that violence.
I appreciate the sentiment from the gentleman from Texas, and I wanted to add some words to the sentiment that you brought to the floor here tonight in this Congress.
Mr. AL GREEN of Texas. I thank the gentleman for his comments. I greatly appreciate the time that you took from your time to continue to elaborate on this. It means a lot to the people that we both represent, and I thank you again.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, again, I thank the gentleman from Texas.
I came here to talk about a couple of other subject matters, Mr. Speaker. The one that's on the front of my mind that I want to make sure I address is the Missouri River flooding that has taken place all down the Missouri River drainage area all summer long. I think for the rest of the country it hasn't been brought to their attention how bad and how devastating this flood is.
You can pick your river in the world and you will know that every river has flooded in history. That's what they do. That's why we have river bottoms. They're flattened out because of the floods. Whether it's the Mississippi River flood or the Missouri River flood or any of the floods that we've had up and down--the New Jersey floods, for example, and the other floods in the northeast part of the United States--they have been devastating; and we have watched on television as we've seen people scramble to get above the waterline and to sandbag to protect the assets that they have.
We watched as the water flooded into New Orleans several years ago with Katrina and the human suffering that went on down there. Some of us went down and did what we could. Myself, I've made four trips down after Katrina to try to lend a hand down there. I've contributed in some way, and I say humbly, in a small way, Mr. Speaker.
But this summer, Midwesterners--people in Missouri and Kansas and Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana--have all suffered from the greatest runoff experienced in recorded history from the Missouri River. This greatest runoff is accumulated this way. It wasn't particularly dramatic in snowcap in the wintertime, not particularly dramatic by March 1 as they measure that snowcap, but several things contribute to the runoff. It's the snow up in the mountains all the way up into Montana; it's the rainfall that takes place there; and it's any dramatic rainfall events.
All of those things came together in the perfect storm fashion--late season, significantly higher snowcap up in the mountains, and then early spring rains that saturated and became a significant runoff. On top of that, a very heavy rainfall event around particularly the Billings, Montana, area where they got 10 to 12 inches of rain; 8 inches, I think, in Billings and 10 to 12 across a vast area, some of it up to 15 inches in some areas.
So the circumstances were that we had all the snow that needed to come down--a large, large amount of snow. We had a lot more rain than expected. The ground was saturated so it didn't soak in. That was running off from broad rains across that had taken place in April and in May. And then on May 22, the massive rainfall that fell in the Billings area and around that was unprecedented in its volume. All of that together created a runoff that if you think of it in these terms, that the largest experience that they had seen was actually 1997. Prior to that was 1881.
In 1881, there were 42 million acre-feet of runoff. That's water a foot deep over 42 million acres; all of that volume, if you just calculate that volume, running off into the Missouri River.
{time} 1800
There are six dams that have been built in the upper Missouri River, reservoirs created by them. And these six dams start in Montana and string down through North Dakota and South Dakota. The furthest most downstream one is Gavins Point at Yankton, South Dakota, and that would be the last valve that controls the flow of the Missouri River from that point, just upstream from Sioux City, all the way down to St. Louis. That's the control valve at Gavins Point.
Forty-two million acre-feet of runoff in 1981, 49 million acre-feet of runoff in 1997, 61--or I guess they said last night 60.4 million acre-feet of runoff this year in 2011, roughly 20 percent more than we had ever experienced before. If you would exempt '97, it was a third more than we had experienced in 1881. These six dams were designed to protect us downstream from serious downstream flooding in the largest runoff event experienced. That was 1881.
He used the commonsense logic of the floods of 1881. The floods in 1943, the floods in 1952 accelerated the construction of the Pick Sloan program. By 1968, we had built the six dams. They were completely operational for the full season of 1968. They were built to protect us from serious downstream flooding, and they were designed to the design elevations necessary to protect us from the largest runoff ever.
And the Corps of Engineers has always held 16.3 million acre-feet of storage as the volume necessary to protect us from the largest runoff ever, 1881. That hasn't changed. Over five different versions of the master manual, the document that governs how they manage the river, hasn't changed at all; but neither had the largest experienced runoff in history, 1881.
Now, I have to quantify that. The 49 million acre-feet in '97 was for the breadth of the year. You compress the 1881 into several months--I believe 4 months of runoff, but it was a shorter period of time. So the monthly volume of runoff was greater in 1981 than it was in 1997. And so the Corps of Engineers had managed this all these years. In 113 years, we had not seen the kind of runoff that we saw in 1881. But it was designed to protect us from the largest runoff ever.
This year, we have the largest runoff ever, and the discharge that previously, coming out of Gavins Point, that last valve to release into the river that goes all the way to St. Louis, the largest discharge was 70,000 cubic feet per second. This year, because of the large volume, the discharge became 160,000 cubic feet per second, substantially more than twice as much volume as we've ever seen before coming through Gavins Point. Designed for a large amount of that, it did hold together and the system held together very well upstream.
But here's their problem, Mr. Speaker, and that is that the Corps of Engineers has determined that this runoff this year is an anomaly, that it's a 500-year event. And so in a 500-year event, they wouldn't change their management of the river substantially because they argue that it's unlikely that it will ever happen again.
My response to that is, a year ago, standing here, no one knew we were going to get the runoff in 2011. The odds of this kind of flood happening that has happened to us in 2011 weren't any greater than they are for the same thing happening next year. And it's the equivalent of--the risks for 2012 are the same as they were for 2011 for a runoff of that magnitude for a number of reasons, but the simple one is this: if you flip a coin twice in a row and it comes up tails twice in a row, what are the odds it will come up tails three times in a row, the third time?
Now, that's just one of those classic examples of statistics. You might think that the odds get to be one in six or something like that; but, truthfully, the odds are 50/50 that that coin will come up tails the third time in a row. If you flip it on its tail six times in a row, what are the odds that it will be tails the seventh time? Fifty/fifty, because we don't know next year whether there's going to be any more or any less runoff than we've had this year. The odds are the same, except that because of the damage to our system, our levees, and our storm protection, because of all of that damage, we're not as prepared to deal with a runoff of that magnitude as we were coming into 2011.
So the risk is greater, even though the odds of it happening again next year are the same. And no one, no mortal that's looking at 113 years of records--and maybe a little more than that--can tell you what a 500-year flood event is. It's not within the capabilities of mortal man.
And the reasons are, because if you're going to calculate the odds of a 500-year event, you would have to look across several thousand years to try to find a pattern to see if you could make that prediction. How many times did this kind of runoff happen in the previous 2,000 years or the previous 3,000 years? I mean, 3,000 years would only be six different increments of 500-year events. Would it happen six times over 3,000 years? Who knows. We have no records to go by. So it's a judgment call made by somebody sitting in an office somewhere--probably in Omaha--that this is a 500-year event. Therefore, they're not going to change the way they manage the river. They got by, okay, for 113 years--not managing the river all that time, just since 1968. But this time we got burned really badly, Mr. Speaker.
And I want to make this point, that to visualize this, this thing that Members of Congress haven't seen--not very many of us--the public hasn't seen hardly at all, think of this, think in our mind's eye of what it looks like to go up near the northwest corner of Iowa, South Dakota border--Sioux City, Iowa--and look at a Missouri River bottom that was flooded with water all summer long from around the first week in June until the first week in September.
That's a mile and a half wide where normally it's a few hundred feet wide. And go downstream a few more miles and the river is 8 miles wide hill to hill. And go down stream a little further to Omaha, right where Interstate 680 goes across, and the water is 11 miles wide. And once it goes through Omaha, Council Bluffs and Glenwood, that's compressed it down within the levees that miraculously held or we would have had a similar-to-Katrina event in Council Bluffs where we had at least 30,000 people living below the water level in their homes. If there's a breach in that dike, they get flooded like they did in New Orleans.
But downstream from there, the river that was narrow enough to go through the cities widens out again four or five, six miles wide on down into Missouri--and Sam Graves can tell you the rest of that story. Now, that's water from hill to hill in many cases, and water that's not sitting there stagnant, Mr. Speaker. This is water that is flowing out in the channel, 11 to 12 miles an hour, and out against the hillside, oh, let's just say six miles away from the channel, or seven. That water is still flowing at four to five miles an hour, and 12, 14, 16 feet deep. Farm buildings, businesses flooded up to the eaves--they're built on the highest piece of ground in the bottom, by the way--this water flowing at four or five miles an hour, dropping sand, debris--not as badly as I thought, but debris--and sand now that's laid out over thousands of acres, some of it 6 feet deep, everywhere, drifts of sand, dunes of sand that are 10 or 12 feet deep.
The trees that are up and down the river that have stood in water for 3 months, most of them will be dead next year. Farms have been destroyed. Thousands and thousands of acres have been destroyed. That's the magnitude of this flood.
Now we have to put the pieces back together, and some people have lost a lot and they can't be made whole again. There are others that will find a way to put it back together. There is a lot of indecision with floods; that's the nature of floods. And we have trouble getting definitive answers to people. But if they're under water June, July, August, into September, if their building sites are surrounded by an ocean--and I have boated to these farm sites. I've flown over it a number of times, and they are sitting in the middle of an ocean where it might be five miles to dry land. And that's the happy family home where they've invested their future.
We can, at the minimum--even though we have some programs, we have some individual disaster assistance, there is some ag assistance, there is also some public assistance for the public utilities that are there, but there is not enough to put the pieces back together. The least we can do is manage the river system so that this doesn't happen again with the similar runoff that we have this year.
We built the Pick Sloan program, the six reservoirs to protect us from the largest runoff ever experienced. Now we have a larger runoff. I cannot comprehend how it isn't just simply an automatic to lower the water level marginally in the upper six reservoirs to have the storage capacity to protect us from this type of runoff.
And just to do the math on it, the bill that I've introduced requires the Corps of Engineers to manage the river to protect us from serious downstream runoff in the event of the largest runoff in history. All it really does in the end is it replaces 1881 with a 2011 flood year.
{time} 1810
It is not particularly complicated. Yes, they have to lower some water levels; but if those water levels are lowered, the effect of that isn't nearly as dramatic as some of the people have described.
First there were some, I will say, some things that alarmed people when the Corps announced that they would have to lower the water levels 12 feet, and that was too much, and they couldn't manage the river. I looked into that. It was 12 feet on the upper three reservoirs, not on all six; and that was with 70,000 cubic feet per second at discharge at Gavins Point, that lowest valve that we have there just upstream from Sioux City.
After a series of questions, they did another analysis. They raised the flow of discharge up to 100,000 cubic feet per second, and just the adjustment of that in the upper three reservoirs changed the 12-foot lowering level elevation down to six.
We should be able to deal with six because, historically, since 1968, on average, Fort Peck has been 7.4 feet below the target elevation. We just lower the target elevation 6 feet; it's still higher than the average of what Fort Peck was. That's also true of each of the dams in the top three, which are the only ones they wanted to adjust because they're the largest.
So that's the effect of the bill, but it also has the effect of protecting us from flooding, serious flooding downstream. And I'm asking my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, to sign on to this bill, particularly those who represent the Missouri River bottom area, those of us who have been affected by the flood, those of us who represent Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. And by the way, all the delegation in Iowa, Democrats and Republicans, have signed on and endorsed the bill. Most of Nebraska has. A lot of the Missourians that are affected have.
I'd ask the others, take a look. This isn't complicated. The red herrings that have been drug across the trail have been addressed and corrected. And the meeting last night in Omaha was, I will say, volatile and dynamic with people that have suffered all summer long. They want to be able to make plans on whether they should be investing in trying to put their farms back in shape. They can't do that, Mr. Speaker, unless we give them some assurance that we're going to manage the river to protect them from serious downstream flooding.
And while that's going on, we just set that highest priority up. Congress has the authority, in fact, we have the obligation to set the standards for the Corps of Engineers. If we fail to do that, they are, then, whip-sawed by all of the litigation that comes of all the special interests. Those special interests can be taken care of below the level that I'm suggesting, and they can have those same levels of priorities that they had within that--irrigation, barge traffic, electrical generation, recreation, fishing. All of those things can work at that level without hardly even noticing it upstream. But you notice it downstream, and the billions of dollars that it takes to put this back together from the damage can never be matched by the recreational investment that goes on upstream. They'll have it anyway. It won't be diminished in any appreciable way. We need to have the protection.
Mr. Speaker, I believe that's H.R. 2942. I have trouble remembering that bill number. I could be wrong. It's the King bill, and I appreciate all those that have cosponsored it; and I'm hopeful that the rest of the Missouri River Representatives will take a look at it. I'm under the understanding that there will be a companion bill introduced in the Senate. Hopefully, it will be bipartisan. That will give us some more incentive to get this done this fall while there's still time to address this issue. If we fail to do so, this river will be managed for another year the same way it was in this past year.
Could I inquire as to the amount of time I have remaining?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman has 2 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I will then just conclude this discussion on the river and not address any other subject matter.
We have not, as a Congress, looked at this Missouri River issue. It's a natural disaster that has been, to some degree, mitigated by the Corps of Engineers. Some of those decisions were awfully tough on a lot of people, and I believe we have an obligation to manage this river system, to protect us from serious downstream flooding, to set that priority and to set the levels, not at 16.3 million acre-feet anymore, that was 1881, but to increase those million acre-feet, not all that much, but enough to protect us from that serious downstream flooding.
If the Members of Congress that represent those areas come together unanimously, we can move a piece of legislation through this Congress, and I would think we could do it under suspension. It's a no-cost piece of legislation. It is a commonsense piece of legislation. It really isn't all that tricky, although we went through all 450 pages of the master manual, and it was hard to write; but now it's a pretty simple solution to a complex problem. I would urge my colleagues to take a look.
I would thank all of those involved for their public statements last night in Omaha and all the meetings that will be taking place up and down the river. I thank the Corps of Engineers for their cooperation in getting me accurate data to work with. And I look forward to resolving this issue, at least for the long term, while we help put people back together in an individual basis in the short term.
With that, Mr. Speaker, thank you for your attention, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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