Missouri River is Running BONE DRY - 10 Million People are Facing a HUGE Water CRISIS!?

Added: 2026-06-06

[00:00:00]The Missouri River moves through the heart of America for 2,341 miles. It starts in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, cuts through the plains of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa, and empties into the Mississippi just north of St. Louis. It drains more than 500,000 square miles. It irrigates the farms that grow the corn and soybeans that feed the country. Kansas City drinks from it. St. Louis drinks from it. Millions of people across 10 states [music] depend on it in ways most of them have never had to think about. In April 2026, the United States Army Corps of Engineers published a number. The Missouri River Basin above Sioux City, Iowa ran at 51% of average for the month of April. 1.5 million acre-feet of water when it should have delivered closer to three. Half the water. And it is the fourth consecutive year this has happened. That number sits in a federal report that most Americans will never read. This video is about what it means.

[00:00:58]First, you need to [music] understand what the Missouri River actually is.

[00:01:01]Because most people think of it as a regional river, a Midwestern thing, something you cross on the highway and barely notice. It is not. The Missouri River is the longest river in the United States, not the Mississippi. The Missouri. At 2,341 miles, it is longer than the Mississippi by a small margin, and the [music] two are so deeply connected that engineers and hydrologists treat them as a single system, the Missouri-Mississippi, the largest river network in North America and one of the largest on Earth. The Missouri drains a watershed that covers parts of [music] 10 states and reaches into Canada. When it rains in Wyoming, that water eventually finds the Missouri. When snowpack builds in the Montana Rockies through [music] winter and melts in spring, that water flows down into the system of six massive dams and reservoirs that the Army Corps of Engineers built along the river's upper reaches starting in the 1940s. Those reservoirs, Fort [music] Peck in Montana, Garrison in North Dakota, Oahe in South Dakota, Big Bend, Fort Randall, and Gavins Point are the plumbing of the American plains. They hold [music] back water in wet years and release it in dry ones. They are the reason cities downstream can count on a river at all.

[00:02:10]And right now, the reservoirs are running low. At the start of the 2026 runoff season, the total volume of water stored in the Missouri River main stem reservoir system [music] sat 7.1 million acre feet below the top of the carryover zone. That is the buffer the system keeps in reserve, the cushion, the margin between enough and not enough.

[00:02:29]The cushion is shrinking. Here is what 51% of average actually looks like on the ground. Runoff is the water that flows into the river system from snowmelt and rain. It is the input.

[00:02:39]Everything downstream [music] depends on it. When April runoff runs at 51% the river is not getting half its water [music] from one rainstorm. It is running at half strength across an entire month, across an entire watershed >> [music] >> the size of most countries. John Remus is the chief of the Army Corps of Engineers Missouri River Basin Water Management Division. He is the person whose job it is to watch this river [music] and tell the truth about it. In May 2026, he said this plainly, "Dry conditions are present in 74% of the basin and drought conditions are expected [music] to persist through July with some expansion likely in Montana and South Dakota. Not improving, persisting, expanding. The 2026 [music] full calendar year runoff forecast above Sioux City is now 67% of average. That number was lowered by 0.7 million acre feet from the month before. The trajectory is downward and this is the fourth consecutive year of drought in the Missouri River Basin, four straight years. The last time this happened was the early 2000s when the system also ran below average for several years in a row and reservoir levels dropped significantly before recovering. The difference now is that the basin is drier to start with. The soil moisture deficits that built up over 3 years do not recover from a single wet season, and the 2026 wet season is not arriving.

[00:03:56]Now, follow the river down and understand what it carries. The Missouri River is not just a water supply. It is a machine, a conveyor belt, a piece of national infrastructure as critical as the Interstate Highway System and far older. 500 million tons of cargo move along the navigable stretch of the Missouri River every single year, mostly agricultural products, corn, soybeans, wheat, the grain that American farmers grow on the plains surrounding this river. Loaded onto barges at the 140 ports, docks, and terminals that line the Missouri from Sioux City, Iowa, to St. Louis, Missouri. 734 miles of commercial waterway that moves the equivalent of 19 million trucks worth of freight every year without touching a single road. When the river drops, the barges sit higher. They cannot load as heavy because there is not enough water underneath them. Every foot of water lost from the river is cargo that cannot move. Farmers who cannot ship, grain that sits in storage instead of reaching the port at New Orleans, where it goes overseas. In 2022, drought-related low water on the Missouri and Mississippi systems forced weeks of shipping slowdowns that cost the agricultural economy hundreds of millions of dollars.

[00:05:04]That was one bad drought year. The Missouri has now had four of them in a row. The cities in the path of a low river are not just facing shipping costs. Kansas City and St. Louis both draw most of their drinking water directly from the Missouri River. When the river drops low enough, the water quality changes. Sediment concentration shifts, treatment costs rise, the margin between clean water and a problem narrows, and above those cities in the upper plains, something else is happening that most people in Kansas City and St. Louis do not know about yet. Someone is planning to take water out of the river. North Dakota wants to build a pipeline. The pipeline would divert water from the Missouri River Basin across a continental divide into the eastern part of North Dakota, where rivers drain north toward Canada rather than south toward the Missouri. The water would support municipal drinking supplies and irrigation in the Red River Valley, home to Fargo and Grand Forks.

[00:05:57]North Dakota says this is a debt the federal government owes them. When the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the northern Missouri River in the 1940s, the construction flooded thousand thousands of acres of Native American land and destroyed communities across the Dakotas. The government promised in exchange to fund irrigation and water supply projects for North Dakota. Those projects never came. North Dakota has been waiting 80 years. The state has already spent $400 million of its own money building the pipeline. It will probably spend another 400 to 500 million to complete it. Missouri is furious. Kurt Schaefer is the director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. He has said on the record that Missouri has been engaged in a water war with North Dakota for more than three decades, and that this pipeline represents an existential threat to agriculture, utilities, public water supplies, power plants, and navigation in the state of Missouri.

[00:06:54]Shane Ken, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect the Missouri River, a group of lower basin stakeholders from multiple states, put it more plainly. He said that when you start moving water out of one basin into another, it is robbing Peter to pay Paul. You solve one problem and create another in a basin that will have to deal with the consequences.

[00:07:14]The detail that makes this genuinely alarming is where the water goes once North Dakota diverts it. Eastern North Dakota drains north, into the Red River, into Canada. Once that water crosses the continental divide through North Dakota's pipeline, it does not come back. It leaves the Missouri River basin permanently. In a drought year, when the basin is already running at 67% of average, every cubic foot diverted upstream is a cubic foot that is no longer there for Kansas City to drink, for barges to float on, for for Nebraska farmers to irrigate with. And North Dakota is not the only state with ambitions. Missouri officials say that if this pipeline stands, it writes the playbook for other upper basin states and western states looking to solve their own water shortages using Missouri River water. The precedent, they say, is the real threat. Now, understand the geography of how this breaks. The Missouri River drops out of the Rocky Mountains and crosses the Great Plains in a long arc before joining the Mississippi. Along that arc, a series of dams holds back the water from the mountains and releases it in a controlled way throughout the year. The six main stem dams are the system's heartbeat. Fort Peck in Montana sits at the top. Below it, Garrison Dam in North Dakota holds back Lake Sakakawea, the third largest reservoir in the United States by volume. Below that, Oahe Dam in South Dakota holds Lake Oahe, which stretches 231 miles, longer than the state of Connecticut is wide. These reservoirs were designed with drought in mind. The Army Corps built enough storage into the system to survive several years of below-average runoff without failing. Remus himself has said the current situation, as serious as it is, is not as bad as the early 2000s drought at its worst. That is true, and it is only half the story because those reservoirs are also doing something in 2026 that they were not doing in the early 2000s.

[00:09:03]In April, the six main stem power plants generated 648 million kWh of electricity. That is 48 million kWh below the typical amount for April. The dams that hold back the water also generate power for the region. When the water runs low, the power output drops.

[00:09:21]Hydropower generation this year is expected to run about 20% below average.

[00:09:25]Lower water, less power, less cargo, less margin. All four things are moving in the same direction at the same time, and the river is not just dealing with drought. In 2026, a new piece of the problem came into focus that had been building for years without anyone saying it plainly. The Missouri River has been reshaped by people, not just by the six main stem dams, but by a web of decisions made over a century and a half of trying to control one of the most powerful rivers on the continent. When the Army Corps built the dams and straightened the river's channel to improve navigation in the 20th century, they changed how the river moves. A natural Missouri River used to meander across a wide floodplain, spreading out, slowing down, depositing sediment, recharging the groundwater beneath the plains. The engineered Missouri moves faster, straighter, and deeper, carrying its water to the Mississippi before it can spread. A faster river loses less to evaporation and groundwater recharge, which sounds good for water supply, but it also means the river delivers its water in a narrower window with less buffer against drought. When the snowpack does not arrive, there is nothing in the landscape to slow the dry spell down. And on top of that, Illinois. The city of Sullivan, Illinois, declared a water emergency in early 2026 and extended it through June, restricting water use to essentials only. Local wells are running low in Ohio and Missouri. The drought that is squeezing the Missouri River is also reaching into the wells and aquifers of the communities that surround it. The Missouri T is not failing in isolation.

[00:10:58]The whole system is running dry at the same time. Now, put it together. Because the number of things that depend on this one river running at a normal level is larger than most Americans have ever thought about. Agriculture first. The Missouri River irrigates farms in Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri. The corn and soybeans grown in this corridor are not just American food. They are American exports. They ride barges down the Missouri and Mississippi to New Orleans and go overseas. When the river drops and barges cannot load heavy, that grain does not disappear, but it costs more to move. It moves slower, and it competes for rail capacity that is already tight.

[00:11:37]The farmer in Nebraska absorbs the cost.

[00:11:39]The buyer in Egypt or Indonesia pays more. The system stretches. Drinking water second. Kansas City and St. Louis are the two largest cities on the river.

[00:11:48]Together, they are home to more than 2 and 1/2 million people. Both draw their municipal water from Missouri. Both have treatment plants built for a freshwater river running at normal levels. When the river drops and runs slower, the ratio of sediment and pollutants to clean water shifts. Treatment costs rise. The margin for error narrows. And below those cities, where the Missouri meets the Mississippi north of St. Louis, anything that goes wrong on the Missouri becomes someone else's problem further downstream. The Mississippi was already running at its driest start to a year in 132 years of records going into 2026.

[00:12:24]The Ohio River, which normally contributes about 50% of the lower Mississippi's flow, has been contributing far less. And Missouri, which fills the upper system, is running at 2/3 of average for the year. The rivers that feed each other are all running low together. Power third. The six dams generate electricity for a region that includes millions of homes and businesses. A 20% drop in hydropower output has to be covered from somewhere.

[00:12:50]That somewhere is usually natural gas or coal, which costs more and produces more emissions. The energy penalty for a low water year is invisible to most consumers. It shows up in a utility bill, in a grid operator's dispatch decision, in a power plant that runs hotter than planned. But it is real, and it adds up. Here is the part that does not make the news. This is the fourth straight year. People said the 2022 drought was a bad year. People said 2023 was an outlier.

[00:13:17]People said 2024 was unlucky. Now it is 2026, and the Army Corps of Engineers is telling the public that dry conditions cover 74% of the Missouri River Basin and are expected to expand. At some point, the word outlier stops meaning anything. Mark Twain, who grew up along the Missouri River system, once reportedly said that whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.

[00:13:40]The officials in Missouri and North Dakota, who are currently locked in a legal and political battle over a pipeline diversion, would seem to agree.

[00:13:48]They are fighting over water that is already short in a basin that keeps getting shorter in a state of national water infrastructure that was designed for a different climate than the one that is arriving. The Missouri River was tamed by engineers in the 20th century, straightened, dammed, channeled, controlled. The dams that hold its water are some of the largest earthen structures ever built. The system that manages them is one of the most sophisticated river management operations in the world, and the system is being asked to deliver again from a basin that has given significantly below what it should for 4 years in a row. So, what actually happens if this continues?

[00:14:27]The short answer is that the reservoirs draw down further. Remus and the Army Corps have been clear that the system was designed to handle multi-year droughts. The water in storage right now is enough to keep the river running for navigation, for water supply, for power generation, tight, but enough. The honest answer is that enough is not a permanent condition. The reservoirs hold what they hold. The snowpack in the Rockies is the only thing that refills them meaningfully. Mountain snowpack as of early May 2026 was at 74% of average in the Fort Peck reach. That is the water that determines June, July, and August flows. When that number is below average, Remus lowers the forecast. He lowered it by 0.7 million acre-feet from April to May. The trend line is not pointing up, and while the Army Corps manages the physical water, it cannot manage the political water. The fight between North Dakota and Missouri over the pipeline will play out in federal agencies and courts while the river runs lower. The western states watching from the sidelines thinking about their own water shortages are paying attention to how this fight ends.

[00:15:32]If the pipeline stands, the precedent stands, and a dozen states with their own water problems will have seen how it is done.

[00:15:39]Let me leave you with this. The Missouri River has been here for millions of years. It carved the landscape of the American Plains long before any person named it. Lewis and Clark spent months traveling up its current describing a river so powerful and unpredictable that their journals read like dispatches from a different planet. They called it the Big Muddy. They respected it the way you respect something that can kill you without trying. The engineers who came after them spent the better part of a century trying to tame it. They built dams the size of small mountains. They straightened its channel. They told the river where to go and when to release and how fast to run. And for decades, by most measures, it worked. The river kept the farmers watered. It kept the barges moving. It kept the taps running in Kansas City and St. Louis. It generated power for millions of people who never thought once about where their electricity came from.

[00:16:31]What is happening now is not a sudden failure. It is a slow one. A river that ran at 51% of its April average in 2026 after running below average for 3 years before that in a basin where drought conditions cover nearly 3/4 of the land managed by a system of reservoirs that sit 7 million acre feet below where they should be. The engineers are still managing it. The Army Corps is still releasing water. The cities are still drinking. The barges are still moving slower and lighter than before, but the system was built for the river that was.

[00:17:04]And the river that is arriving in 2026 is a different one. Drop a comment below. Do you live in one of the states along the Missouri River? Tell me what you are seeing on the ground. If this video told you something you did not know, share it. This is the kind of thing that matters before it becomes a crisis. Subscribe if you want more. We cover the systems holding America together every week with the full picture. See you in the next one.