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For years, some small towns and farmers along the Mississippi River have been battling each other over a flood project set up by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

On the western shore, farmers in southeast Missouri need the project to protect their valuable farmland. But small river towns on the eastern side of the river say the project protects those influential farmers at the cost of their small communities. As a last-ditch effort, the opposition to the project is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to kill the project all together.

Lynn Bock is the attorney for the St. John Levee and Drainage District in New Madrid, Mo. He lives at the southern end of the floodplain. Part of the levee system there follows the Mississippi River path. On the other side of the levee are thousands of acres of productive farmland.

"When you look at these fields, that's our strip mall. That's our economy in this part of the world," Bock says. "We make it or don't make it based on how farmers do."

The levee system here is part of a $165 million dollar project called the New Madrid Floodway Project that's designed to protect the land around the Mississippi River. Farmers grow millions of dollars' worth of soybeans, corn, cotton and rice there.

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A truck drives on top of a levee that protects a soybean field in New Madrid County, Mo., when the Mississippi River floods. Kristofor Husted/KBIA hide caption

itoggle caption Kristofor Husted/KBIA

A truck drives on top of a levee that protects a soybean field in New Madrid County, Mo., when the Mississippi River floods.

Kristofor Husted/KBIA

The farmland isn't without its weaknesses, though. During major Mississippi River floods, the Army Corps diverts the excess water into this floodplain, called the New Madrid Floodway.

Now, the Corps wants to effectively separate the farmland from the river by completing the levee system and building an earthen wall along a 1,500-foot gap. This final levee would essentially cordon off the lucrative farmland in the floodway, protecting the crops from most floods. That's good for farmers west of the river, but maybe not so good for towns on the other side.

"[With] what we can produce in the floodway itself, in [those] 133,000 acres of farmland, we're able to feed on an annual basis about 1.3 million people," says Kevin Mainord, farmer and mayor of East Prairie, Mo. He says closing that gap is critical.

The levee system protects the farms most of the time, but every 75 years or so, a major flood slams the area. Then, the New Madrid Floodway has to be opened up and used as, well, a floodway.

That's what happened in the great flood of 2011. The floodwater was sweeping up to the edges of Cairo, Ill., a town of 2,800 with many low-income residents.

"We did everything imaginable to help people during that situation because it was awful," says Monica Smith, who works at the Cairo library. "People had to leave their homes that hadn't been out of their homes in years, and then some of them didn't have any place to go."

When the Army Corps planned to open up the floodway to help Cairo, the state of Missouri, backed by U.S. members of Congress, sued to stop the move. The state wanted to prevent damage to crops already planted. For two days, the floodwaters crept up on Cairo. Mayor Tyrone Coleman says after the town was evacuated, some stayed behind to fight the flood.

"We had to utilize inmates from the maximum [security] prison, Corps of Engineer personnel, National Guard, and then there were a number of local citizens that helped with sand bagging," he says.

After two intense and difficult days, Missouri lost the legal challenge and the Corps opened the floodway. But some say it was too little, too late. And after that flood, many residents never returned to Cairo.

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Mayor Tyrone Coleman of Cairo, Ill., opposes the New Madrid Floodway project. A major flood in 2011 forced his town to evacuate. Kristofor Husted/KBIA hide caption

itoggle caption Kristofor Husted/KBIA

Mayor Tyrone Coleman of Cairo, Ill., opposes the New Madrid Floodway project. A major flood in 2011 forced his town to evacuate.

Kristofor Husted/KBIA

On the other side, with the floodway open, the water wiped away many of crops. Many of those residents never returned either.

"The floodway was destroyed — completely," Mainord says. "There are probably seven residents that are living there now , where there were hundreds before the flood of 2011."

Now, the Army Corps wants to close off the last part of the levee system, and that's pitting some deep-pocketed farm owners against less wealthy towns like Cairo. Environmental groups, like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, are also fighting the project. They say cutting off the floodway with a plug would be catastrophic for the 50,000 acres of wetland that fish and waterfowl call home.

Project engineer Danny Ward says the Corps' most recent environmental impact statement is meant to appease those concerns.

"We [sought] to balance the socioeconomic impacts associated with floods, as well as the environmental benefits derived from the flooding," he says.

Around the Nation

Missouri Levee Blast Eases Threat To Illinois Town

The Corps says the new levee won't affect Cairo, and the floodway will still be used during historic floods. But Mayor Coleman, who had a front-row seat to the devastation in 2011, isn't buying it.

"You know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what's happening here," Coleman says.

The Two-Way

Midwest River Towns Ready Themselves For Cresting Floodwaters

As a final play, Cairo has teamed up with other river towns and conservation groups to ask the Environmental Protection Agency to use part of the Clean Water Act to kill the entire project.

Sometime after March, the public will have a chance to comment on the project, after an independent panel reviews the Corps' most recent environmental impact statement.

This story comes to us from Harvest Public Media, a public radio reporting collaboration that focuses on agriculture and food production.

Army Corps of Engineers

Mississippi River flooding

It's been called one of the great rivalries of the art world — a clash between egos, riches and ideologies. In the spring of 1932, capitalist (and prolific collector of Mexican art) Nelson Rockefeller hired Mexican painter and staunch socialist Diego Rivera to paint a mural for the lobby of the newly erected Rockefeller Center in New York City. Sketches were drawn and approved, but when reporters leaked that Rivera had added an image of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, a battle began.

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Diego Rivera, seen here in 1933, works on a panel of his mural in the lobby of Rockefeller Center. AP hide caption

itoggle caption AP

Diego Rivera, seen here in 1933, works on a panel of his mural in the lobby of Rockefeller Center.

AP

In the end, the painting was destroyed, ideological differences hardened and the two families lived with a legacy of animosity. But now the daughters of the two men have teamed up to leave the past behind and preserve not only their fathers' legacies, but the art they both loved. Guadalupe Rivera Marin, 90, and Ann Rockefeller, 80, aim to raise $3 million each to build individual galleries in their fathers' names at the Mexican Museum, set to break ground at a new and bigger site this year in San Francisco.

In the dining room of her Mexico City home, Rivera Marin recounts meeting Ann Rockefeller in the 1980s. She says the two took an immediate liking to each other. They had much in common — after all, they were both daughters of famous fathers. During that meeting, Ann Rockefeller told Rivera Marin that as a young girl she didn't want the family name — she wanted to make it on her own.

"In that sense," Rivera Marin says, "I was exactly, more or less, the same, you know? I never [wanted] to be the daughter of Diego Rivera, and I always [wanted] to be myself and to have my own life."

Rockefeller says she never harbored ill feelings toward Rivera Marin. "Between us there were no wounds."

Andrew Kluger, chairman of the museum's board, calls the collaboration a "peace-making motion." "They just decided, 'Let's put it aside,'" he says. "'That's the old men; this is us.'"

Nelson Rockefeller examines a painting at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1939. Rockefeller was 23 when he hired Diego Rivera to paint a mural in the newly built Rockefeller Center. Bettmann/CORBIS hide caption

itoggle caption Bettmann/CORBIS

According to Ann Rockefeller, the breakdown between the men was political: The mural was just too radical for her father, and especially for her grandfather, John D. Rockefeller. She says, "They saw it as a terrible, unjust and outrageous attack on what they understood to be their own morals and ways."

Not only did it depict Lenin, but there was also a scene of a wealthy man drinking and cavorting with women. (John D. Rockefeller supported Prohibition.)

For Rivera, the fight over the mural and its destruction was devastating. According to Rivera Marin, her father was never the same. "[It] was [a] terrible moment," she says. "There are photos in which you can see he is destroyed — completely destroyed."

Rivera did get a chance to repaint the mural in Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes — this time with funding from the Mexican government and no censorship. Years later, he and Nelson Rockefeller even became friends again.

Art & Design

Destroyed By Rockefellers, Mural Trespassed On Political Vision

And before Rivera died in 1957, Rivera Marin also got a chance to repair her relationship with her father, which was strained for many years over political differences. Rivera told her he was proud of her accomplishments. "That was a great satisfaction for me," Rivera Marin says.

Now she works to preserve her father's work and legacy, and so does Ann Rockefeller, who donated her father's vast collection of Mexican art to the Mexican Museum Her contribution now makes up the bulk of the museum's collection.

The Rockefeller and Rivera galleries are expected to open when the Mexican Museum debuts at its new location in 2018.

Oil companies in North Dakota are looking for the fastest and cheapest way to get their product to refineries, and they've set their sights on moving more of their product by rail to the Northwest.

There are six new oil terminals proposed for Washington state. Half of them could be built in the small communities around Grays Harbor, a bay on the Pacific coast about 50 miles north of the mouth of the Columbia River.

Al Carter has lived in Grays Harbor County pretty much his whole life. He served as a county commissioner for eight years. He's pro-development and pro-business. When he was in office he called himself an "infrastructure guy".

"Sewer, water, roads ... those are infrastructure things in a community that makes a community grow," Carter says. "If you build those things, then people will come to those places.

He wants to see more businesses set up shop in Grays Harbor County, which has an unemployment rate of 10.6 percent, more than four percentage points higher than the state average. The county has struggled since the lumber industry contracted in the 1970s and 1980s.

Carter isn't against oil coming through his community — for him, it's an issue of balance and scale.

Three oil terminals are proposed to be built in Grays Harbor. At maximum capacity, more than 700 ships and barges would come in and out each yea, while eight or more trains would roll through town each day, delivering oil to those ships.

"For me, the biggest thing is, I don't think any one thing should dominate the whole landscape. That much oil — all we're going to be is an oil terminal," Carter says. "Nothing else is going to come here, nobody else is going to want to come here. There won't be any room for anything else."

In the short term, constructing the terminals would create hundreds of jobs. Longer term, according to research from the oil companies, the terminals would lead to about 150 jobs.

Paul Queary is a spokesperson for Westway Terminals and Imperium Renewables — two of the three companies that want to build here, which say they are committed to the highest levels of public safety and environmental protection.

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"They will help support the existing refinery jobs elsewhere in Washingto, and they will bring domestically produced oil to U.S. refineries and help increase U.S. energy independence," Queary says.

Environmentalists say the terminals proposed for the Northwest aren't just being built to move oil to U.S. refineries — they also could export crude from the Canadian oil sands. Right now, it's illegal to export U.S. crude oil.

Oil prices have been dropping, but industry experts say that more infrastructure — including pipelines, railroads and terminals — still are needed to catch up with the North American oil boom.

"The Northwest is the most likely market for Bakken crude or North Dakota crude to go to," says Tom Kloza, an energy analyst for Oil Price Information Service.

He says that as the Northwest gets less oil from Alaska, refineries here need to make up the difference with North Dakota crude.

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Dungeness crab is unloaded at the Quinault docks in Westport, Wash. About one-fifth of the tribe makes their living in the fishing industry. They're worried about how oil shipping could affect the environment — and their way of life. Ashley Ahearn/KUOW hide caption

itoggle caption Ashley Ahearn/KUOW

Dungeness crab is unloaded at the Quinault docks in Westport, Wash. About one-fifth of the tribe makes their living in the fishing industry. They're worried about how oil shipping could affect the environment — and their way of life.

Ashley Ahearn/KUOW

"Whether it's the most hospitable is going to depend on the way the local communities and regulators looked at the environmental consequences," Kloza says.

The Quinault Indian Nation takes up the northwestern corner of the county, and about a fifth of the tribe's 2,900 members make their living from fishing and crabbing.

They unload freshly caught salmon, Dungeness crab and razor clams at their docks at the mouth of Grays Harbor, and are worried about what an oil train derailment or a ship accident could do to their way of life.

The Quinault have joined with the local fishing industry groups and environmentalists in opposition to the Grays Harbor oil terminals, but Fawn Sharp, president of the tribe, says the Quinault aren't anti-jobs.

"We're simply anti making shortsighted, narrow decisions," Sharp says. "Let's look at the science, let's look at the history and culture of the impacts, and make a good public policy decision."

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Quinault Indian Nation President Fawn Sharp stands on the docks as tribal crabbers unload their catch. The tribe has vowed to fight the oil train-to-ship terminals proposed for Grays Harbor. Ashley Ahearn/KUOW hide caption

itoggle caption Ashley Ahearn/KUOW

Quinault Indian Nation President Fawn Sharp stands on the docks as tribal crabbers unload their catch. The tribe has vowed to fight the oil train-to-ship terminals proposed for Grays Harbor.

Ashley Ahearn/KUOW

She sees the oil terminals as a symptom of a much bigger problem that threatens her people: climate change. Last year, the ocean flooded into the Quinault's tribal village, forcing a state of emergency. The glacier that used to feed the Quinault River is gone.

State agencies are in the process of conducting the environmental review for the terminals.

crude oil

oil exports

shipping

Washington State

North Dakota

Bad news for bivalves comes this week from scientists studying ocean acidification.

Ocean water in parts of the world is changing. Its chemistry is very slowly becoming more acidic, like lemon juice, and less alkaline, a la baking soda.

The change so far is small — you wouldn't notice if you swam in the ocean or even drank it (not recommended, in any case). But numerous scientific studies show that it could get worse. One reason is that as humans produce more carbon dioxide, a lot is absorbed into the oceans. That makes the water more acidic.

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Eastern oysters in South Kingston, RI on July 25, 2013. Rick Friedman/Nature hide caption

itoggle caption Rick Friedman/Nature

Eastern oysters in South Kingston, RI on July 25, 2013.

Rick Friedman/Nature

The Salt

How Climate Change Is Changing The Oyster Business

So, shellfish. Why is this bad news for them, and the $1 billion industry devoted to them in the U.S.?

Well, anything that builds a shell depends on calcium compounds in water. If water gets too acidic, it interferes with the chemistry of shell-building. So oysters, mussels, scallops and lots more will suffer in an increasingly acidic ocean. Crabs and lobsters and coral reefs will feel it as well, but mollusks are most vulnerable.

According to research published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, you can already measure the harmful effects on shellfish in places like the Pacific Northwest.

The study is billed as the first analysis of how shellfisheries in 15 states in the U.S. are likely to fare as this acidification continues. With 17 authors from 13 academic, government and environmental institutions, it examines not just ocean chemistry but local coastal pollution and how that combines with acidification.

And the news for the mollusk industry, as we said, is bad, though not without hope.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Some of the coastal areas could see damage from acidification within a few years. Southern Maine and southern Massachusetts are hot spots, as are estuaries along the East Coast, like the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound. The latter are suffering from a lot of nitrogen pollution already from agricultural and sewage runoff. That pollution exacerbates the effects of acidification.

The study also points to the Gulf of Mexico as particularly vulnerable, in part because so few species of shellfish are harvested there. The more diverse the species, the study authors argue, the better chance a few will be resistant to the Gulf's changing chemistry.

Environment

Underwater Meadows Might Serve As Antacid For Acid Seas

The study also points to coastal communities in New Jersey, Virginia and Louisiana that have relatively less monitoring of ocean acidity under way.

The hopeful note in the research is that there are solutions short of stopping the emission of carbon dioxide into the air. Reducing local nitrogen pollution in rivers and bays along the coasts is one. Raising shellfish where the ocean is less affected is another. There may also be strains of oysters that are resistant to acidity.

"There is plenty we can do to help these at-risk communities while protecting the environment," Lisa Suatoni, an ecologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and one of the authors, said in a statement.

shellfish

oceans

climate change