Consider This from NPR - What Happens When The Mighty Mississippi Becomes The Measly Mississippi

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

The extremes of climate change are wreaking havoc on the Mississippi. Over the past two months, this critical waterway has seen below average rainfall. In some places, water levels haven't been this low for more than 30 years. NPR's Debbie Elliot explains how that is helping the salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico push upriver, threatening municipal and commercial water supplies.Then Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco and Eva Tesfaye, of The Mississippi River Basin Ag and Water Desk, show us how life on the river can be just as hard when climate change produces too much water. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The Mississippi River is one of the biggest trade routes in America. And right now, it's a disaster. The mighty Mississippi River is the measly Mississippi. has seen well below average rainfall. It's been so bad that some key shipping areas on the lower Mississippi, which flows south from Cairo, Illinois, reached historic lows set more than 30 years ago. In some areas, the low water levels are grounding boats and causing shipping delays. And people like Captain Adrian Perani, who runs an Army Corps of Engineers ship along the river, are really noticing. This is the worst I've ever seen.

Captain Pirani's ship is called Dredge Hurley. We recently caught up with him as he was working to try and keep a section of the river north of Memphis open for business. The river was completely closed here for a few days. The Mississippi River acts like a highway. Roughly 500 million tons worth of goods move up and down the waterway each year. And for the past decade, the river has seen some extremes. Both historic high and low depths have come almost back to back, which is a pattern only intensified by the warming climate. I would say about 60 percent of the exports out of the U.S. go out through the center gulf from Ohio all the way to Iowa and all the way up

to Wisconsin and Minnesota. And then it goes all the way down to New Orleans. Alan Barrett, who's an economist with the consulting firm Higbee Barrett, told my colleague Aisha Roscoe that right now, low water levels are slowing down the flow of these goods. And the worst part about the low water is it's happening right as harvest begins. This is the time of year where we're providing the crops to the world. Since half of America's grain exports flow down the river, storage has run out for farmers waiting to get the fall harvest onto barges. Here's Randy Shamness with the Lower Mississippi Committee, an association of shipping groups. And although we are moving it, we're moving in much less quantities, so it just keeps backing

up and backing up. Consider this. The Mississippi River is still one of this country's main economic arteries, but climate change is helping wreak havoc up and down the river. Local communities are either dealing with too much rainfall or not enough. And it's creating immediate consequences that affect not just the people surrounding the basin, but much of the country, too. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Friday, from NPR. More than a third of rain in the U.S. ends up in the Mississippi River. That's when it does rain, but the recent drought in the Midwest has sent water levels along some stretches of the river plunging to near-record lows. It's stark. We are seeing operational challenges that are almost unprecedented. It's absolutely a water superhighway. This is

irreplaceable. That's Paul Rohde, who represents the river's shipping and towing industry, explaining it to CBS News. Some of the river now sits below sea level. And in South Louisiana, it's causing a unique phenomenon, changing the point at which the freshwater river water meets the salty sea. As NPR's Debbie Elliott explains, as the salty Gulf of Mexico pushes up river, it's threatening municipal and commercial water supplies. Ducks have taken roost on a sandy strip along the Mississippi River, a bank that's typically underwater. We have this little nice little beach here that the black-bellied whistling ducks are enjoying. That's Heath Jones, Chief of Emergency Management at the New Orleans District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He's looking out at the low river from

atop the levee at Corps headquarters. The river gauge here registers just three feet above sea level. It's telling us the river's low. It's approaching some historical lows that we've had here. More than a third of the rain in the U.S. ends up in the Mississippi River system. Jones says with little or no rainfall coming from the Midwest, there's not enough flow by the time the river reaches south Louisiana to keep the Gulf of Mexico from creeping in. That changes the point at which the river and sea meet. As the flows in the Mississippi River drop, the Gulf of Mexico essentially comes upstream. A saltwater wedge

has crept along the river bottom nearly 64 miles upriver from the mouth of the Mississippi. It's almost like a triangle. As this flow in the Mississippi River drops, it loses its ability to keep saltwater at bay. The saltwater intrusion is threatening both municipal drinking water supplies in the New Orleans metro area, as well as commercial water users, like oil refineries that depend on fresh water from the Mississippi. The biggest impact so far is in Plaquemines Parish. The golf is winning. Benny Roussel is a councilman in Plaquemines, a parish with about 24,000 people and water-dependent industries south of New Orleans.

A former parish president, Roussel has been through this before and is trying to keep a positive outlook. It looks pretty good if you want to catch saltfish. You can catch redfish pretty well north now and some flounder pretty well north. It's good for fishing but it's not very good for drinking water. Saltwater has already compromised two of the parish's water treatment plants and is threatening a third. Roussel says local officials are trying to adapt to the crisis. We're bringing in some desalinization units to hook up to the plant to be able to take the salt out and manufacture water in those areas. To save Plaquemines' biggest plant and protect the larger Orleans Parish water system,

the Corps of Engineers is trying to block the salt water from encroaching farther, says emergency manager Heath Jones. We are building, lack of a better term, an underwater levee. A contractor pumps sand from the riverbed to create a submerged wall stretching from bank to bank across the Mississippi. It's hard to imagine being able to stop water from flowing over a deep dam, but Jones says the dense saltwater stays at the bottom of the water column. We call it a saltwater sill, but essentially it's a big mound of sand, a berm of sand, that stops the saltwater at the bottom of the river. And as it stops at the bottom of the river, the Gulf doesn't have the force to push it over the top. The sill is built to allow 55 feet of clearance so big ships can still pass over it. At the bend in the river at New Orleans,

a meandering Mississippi has a cool blue-green hue, different than the muddy current that typically rushes by. Saltwater comes upriver to some extent every year, but has only threatened water supplies about every 10 years. The Corps built similar multi-million dollar underwater levees in 1988, 99, and in 2012. Some experts say saltwater intrusion could be a more frequent threat now because the Corps is dredging the Mississippi River even deeper for navigation, allowing the saltwater to move in faster. And then there's climate change. You're really tasting sea level rise. Mark Davis is director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy. The more sea level rises, the more salt water comes in.

And in some ways we've made it easier this year because we recently dredged the mouth of the river so it would be deeper, so larger cargo vessels can come in. And that just opens the door for even more salt. For now, the underwater levee will remain in place until the Mississippi River has enough flow to eventually wash it away. That was NPR's Debbie Elliott reporting there. So what happens if the river has too much flow?

Well, we just mentioned that some parts of the Mississippi River Basin experienced drought conditions this year. But there are other areas that have to deal with extreme rain. And this could be the norm. A journalism project called the Mississippi River Basin Ag and Water Desk has found that annual rainfall is increasing in some parts of the basin. That's because as climate change intensifies hurricanes along the coasts, it's also bringing extreme rainfall to inland communities. And for those living along the river, extreme rainfall is not necessarily a good thing. Reporters Juan Pablo Ramirez Franco and Eva Tesfai have more. Freeport, Illinois, is a rust belt town west of Chicago. And this past summer, the Pecatonica River flooded the city.

It's something Lori Thomas and her mother have almost grown accustomed to. Their house has flooded at least 15 times in the past 20 years. But for them, moving is not an option. People have always lived over here, and there's always been the Pecatonica, but lately the floods have been worse, but they've been worse everywhere else too. That's not a reason to kick people out of their homes. Last year, the city of Freeport, with over $3 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, launched a program to buy and remove homes along the river and return the land to floodplains. City officials say that the average home on the east side is valued at around $15,000. Homeowners can be offered up to an additional $31,000. Thomas says that's just not enough money for her mother to pick up and start over elsewhere. She and some neighbors would rather take their chances with the river. The lady over there is in a wheelchair.

She's been there all her life. These are older people. Where the hell are they going? It's not just Freeport. Our reporters found that parts of the Mississippi River Basin receive up to eight more inches of rain a year than they did five decades ago. It's causing economic strain,

hurting quality of life, and forcing people to make hard decisions about whether to stay or leave. Laura Lightbody is with the Pew Charitable Trust's Flood Prepared Communities Initiative. She says development can't keep happening in floodplains. The old way isn't working for today's population. And so that has resulted in rethinking the engineering solution versus a new look at the role that nature can play.

Buy out or not, restoring floodplains will mean totally transforming river communities like Freeport. But for these efforts to succeed, they'll need support and substantial resources. Otherwise, families like Thomas's will continue to opt out altogether. I'm Eva Tesfai, one state over in Atchison County, Missouri. Reagan Griffin makes his way through the tall grasses of what used to be farmland along the Missouri River, another tributary of the Mississippi. He's a corn and soy farmer and is on the local levee board. He stops at a pond and points out what's left of an old levee on the other side of it. That, I'm pretty sure, was the crest of the levee.

I think it ran right through here and then this was a hole that got eaten out through it. During the flood of 2019, water rushed through that hole, drowning the crops. Three years later, the water is still there. It turned into a pond that's now surrounded by grassland. That's because after the area was devastated by three major floods in the span of 30 years, the small farming community decided that something needed to change. It seems like we're getting more extreme examples of flooding, more extreme issues with water, so we need to start looking at this differently. So the Atchison County Levee Board proposed a setback. With the help of the Army Corps of Engineers and other organizations and agencies, the levy was moved, making room for the river to flood.

Communities throughout the basin are coming up with creative ideas like this to address flooding, and federal officials are starting to notice the need across the country. You're talking tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to mitigate the effects of climate change, sea level rise, aging infrastructures. Eric Letvin is the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Deputy Assistant Administrator for Mitigation. In 2020, the agency launched a program geared towards funding large, locally-led projects that fortify areas before disasters strike. So far, inland Mississippi River communities have received less money from this program than coastal ones. Letman says that's in part because they don't have the staff or resources to apply for the funds.

But Pew's Lightbody says communities need to come up with local solutions as well. As she sees it, the federal government just doesn't have enough money. They don't have the resources to fully rebuild communities time and time again. It's not clear how river communities will look a century from now, but most experts agree change is necessary to create a better and safer future. And the time to act is now instead of waiting for the next flood. That was Juan Pablo Ramirez FrancoFranco and Eva Tesfai reporting. That story came to us from the Mississippi River Basin Agriculture and Water Desk, an environmental reporting collaborative. Earlier in the episode, we also heard reporting from Christopher Blank of member station WKNO in Memphis.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.