Two freshman Congressmen from southern Illinois want the Army Corps of Engineers to start thinking of ways it can coordinate river management to keep cargo traffic flowing during droughts or floods.
The measure from Democrat Bill Enyart and Republican Rodney Davis would allow the Corps to do work like dredging or rock blasting outside of the main navigation channel without special permission from Congress.
It would also install new river gauges up and down the channel to improve forecasting.
Davis says this past summer’s drought shows why those changes are needed.
“Because of the forecasting that the river, the nav channel may not be open, coal miners in my district lost jobs. Based on the forecast. Based on the possibility of the Corps not having the flexibility or the permission to go blow up rock formations,” Davis said.
The requested study would look at how the government could change its management of locks and dams, and upstream reservoirs.
Enyart says it’s time the country started thinking about rivers as a system, not individual bodies of water.
“How do you balance someone getting to go boating against being able to get barges full of soybeans and corn out to feed the world,” Enyart said. “As it stands today, we can’t balance those.”
