________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
the Ohio River locks and dams are not there for flood control. They are there for
navigation--to maintain a nine-foot pool for navigation.
Those main stem dams don't have a flood control component; they don't back up water and
hold it for flood control. When floods occur, the gates are opened, and natural flows occur.
So, you get a lot of water coming from the Ohio into the Mississippi system.
Within the Ohio River Division there's a tremendous system established for reservoir
control, centered out of the reservoir control room in Cincinnati. It uses measuring gauges at
all of the various tributaries and lakes, connected by satellite. The satellite retrieves the data
day and night as it's going over these places and feeds the computer system in Cincinnati,
which links to Vicksburg. Our division reservoir control folks talk to the ones in Vicksburg
who are measuring the lower Mississippi. They make a determination as to what the flows
are and what they expect it to be at the gauge at Cairo and on downstream.
Cairo is where the Ohio comes into the Mississippi. With the Missouri and upper Mississippi
already there, that becomes a pretty important point for gauging. Our ability, then, to control
flows into the Mississippi might or might not be limited, depending on where the waters are
and what we've done on these upstream dams.
Within the the Ohio River Division area is the Tennessee River, which is operated by the
Tennessee Valley Authority. The division is supposed to give the Tennessee Valley
Authority instructions as to what to do on the Tennessee, and they're supposed to abide by
our instructions.
Basically, in Vicksburg they're watching the curves of the water and communicating to us,
and we're communicating to them. We're saying when the next Ohio rise is expected to
arrive at Cairo hours and days in advance. They're reading from the North Central Division
and the Missouri River Division what the flows are coming out of the upper Mississippi and
Missouri, and they can predict stages. They can then say, "We expect the Missouri to reach
Cairo at such and such a time three days hence. If you can hold anything back and prevent
your rise from either getting there before or after, please do so."
So, in Vicksburg they try to work out those kinds of things to take care of the flooding. It's
important at Cairo because of the New Madrid Floodway. If needed, the New Madrid
Floodway is opened by blowing the levee and letting the water divert down that floodway,
which wipes out a lot of farmers and their properties and their investments. That became an
issue when I was on the commission. The local farmers in the floodway were seeking to find
some way to prevent the Lower Mississippi Valley Division from blowing the levee to make
the floodway happen. That was one of the things Bill Read had to wrestle with, so I can't
expand on that much more.
When I was at Belvoir, we were developing the TEXS [Tactical Explosive System], the
liquid explosive system that we never were able to bring into the combat engineer inventory.
However, the Lower Mississippi Valley Division used that principle, preparing the pipes and
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