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Conservationists will let the Mississippi-Missouri confluence flood — and that’s good ^⁠27%

5/19/2026, 3:00:00 AM

Keywords: Columbia Bottom Conservation Area, Spanish Lake, Missouri Department Of Conservation, U S Army Corps Of Engineers, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Confluence, Levees, Wetlands, Conservation

BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Optimism Bias, Appeal to Authority, and Negativity Bias, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 30.3% saturation with 276 hits. Analysis detected 1,584 faulty-reasoning hits from 910 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 38.1% and a BS Rank of ⁠27% (16,144 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 73.80% of the article peer group.

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910 words

A lush, sprawling wetland at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers is now covered in a big pile of mud.

Soon, it will be a new levee: a 10-foot wall of grass and native plants near the entrance of the Columbia Bottom Conservation Area.

That’s because the one that currently sits close to the rivers’ edge is pretty bad at its job.

The area saw a surge in historic flooding in recent years, and the current levee has failed five times, flooding nearby farmland and spurring costly repairs.

The new system should be beneficial for everyone and leave recreation areas mostly intact.

“We're kind of trying to limit as much of the infrastructure that's going to get impacted by flooding as we can,” said Dan Zarlenga of the Missouri Department of Conservation.

The old levee kept water off the flood plain entirely.

That meant the department could manually pump water into the flood plain to attract ducks — and duck hunters — to the area.

But because extreme floods are becoming more common, Zarlenga said it’s no longer worth taxpayer dollars to keep fixing that system.

“We kept getting damage,” Zarlenga said.

“The water would top that levee, would run down with great force, would shear the road away (and) destroy the trail.”

Flooding the place

Now, the levee will only protect the farmland just outside the conservation area.

That means the department is going to let the rest of the area flood.

But that’s exactly what this land is meant to do.

Iryna Dronova, a UC Berkeley professor and an expert on setback levee projects, said flood plains like Columbia Bottom act like big sponges that soak up excess water and slowly drain it back to the river.

“This very process of spreading out the area lowers the height of the water,” Dronova said.

“It also reduces the velocity of the current because it has more room to go.

And that in itself significantly lowers the risk of both catastrophic floods and levee breaches.”

Dronova said this makes extreme flooding events a lot less likely and can reduce long-term repair costs by up to 40%.

And once the department moves the levee back, Dronova said the land will start reforming its natural ecosystem right away and all on its own.

The new setback levees are designed to flood the land when water is high.

But when water levels lessen, a healthier ecosystem could mean increased interest in recreation.

Dronova said a more robust ecosystem can boost the area’s natural beauty.

That can attract visitors, which creates memories that foster public approval for conservation projects.

“This vibrant ecosystem offers a tremendous recreational value for people who live next to it, and that can also lead to increased property values.”

Dronova said.

And that public approval can turn into more funding for future research and conservation projects, which is becoming more uncertain in the face of Trump administration cuts.

Chad Olney with the U.S.

Army Corps of Engineers said the department is keeping the levee close to high ground to restore as much land as possible.

“The conservation area will be allowed to function more like a natural flood plain,” Olney said.

“When the river comes up, it'll flood and then freely drain once the rivers go back down.”

Preserving freshwater supply

Setback levees are also one of the cheapest tools for protecting freshwater supply, according to Mike Eichholz, a wetlands researcher at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

The term “freshwater” is usually associated with what comes out of the tap.

But a huge share of that water goes toward manufacturing and growing crops.

And its supply is threatened not just in Missouri but globally by levees like the existing one at Columbia Bottom.

Because traditional levees keep water out of the flood plain, it rushes quickly back into rivers and eventually to the ocean, taking a lot of drinking and farming water with it.

Eichholz said projects like this new levee slow the water’s return to the ocean and preserve access to water in the long term.

“The issue we have is all this water is coming down,” Eichholz said.

“It's got to go somewhere, and we've been trying to control it for the last 75 years.

So, the benefit of setting those levees back is it provides somewhere else for that water to go.”

This works best when there are multiple setback levees along the same body of water that work together, Eichholz said, because each setback levee relieves pressure on water both upstream and downstream from it.

Restored wetlands like the one at Columbia Bottom aim to re-create an approximation of a natural wetland.

But undisturbed land benefits from thousands of years of rich biodiversity, including a microbiome created by a collection of native plants that often no longer exists in wetlands that have been developed for traditional levee projects.

Despite becoming a functional wetland with many immediate benefits, it could take a long time to return to something resembling its original state, Eichholz said.

“We're restoring the water back to this landscape, but that's not the pesticide-free, fertilizer-free water that historically went in there,” he said.

“It's never going to get back to the wetland that it was, you know, 200 years ago.”

Still, Eichholz said, the new setback levees in the flood plain will reduce flood risk and start stocking up freshwater almost immediately.

910 words analyzed.

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Conservationists will let the Mississippi-Missouri confluence flood — and that’s good ^⁠27%

Speakers

Chad Olney

Analysis

Biases

Fallacies

Manipulations

Conservationists will let the Mississippi-Missouri confluence flood — and that’s good ⁠27%

Speakers

Chad Olney

Analysis

Biases

Fallacies

Manipulations

Conservationists will let the Mississippi-Missouri confluence flood — and that’s good ^⁠27%