TVA to provide upstream help for Mississippi River as levels reach record lows

A little help is coming for the Mississippi River in Memphis.

The Tennessee Valley Authority announced this week that it will release water from Kentucky Dam on the Tennessee River and Barkley Dam on the Cumberland River in Kentucky into the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

The move is designed to help stabilize commercial navigation on the waterways, the TVA said in a Facebook post. The Mississippi River at Cairo, Illinois, is nearing its lowest level since 1901. And the Mississippi River at Memphis set a new record of -10.71 feet, on Monday at the meter just southwest of the I-55 "Old Bridge," and had gone even lower, down to -10.75 feet, by 2 p.m.

The previous record was set in 1988.

The TVA cited "below-normal rainfall" in the Midwest as the reason for the low water levels.

Snow melting, along with rain, from upstream will cause the river to rise, but as of right now, the National Weather Service Memphis is unsure what those levels will look like.

Meteorologist Sheana Walsh told The Commercial Appeal on Monday that even with the recent rainfall Memphis has seen, the precipitation would not increase the water level here and would instead go downstream.

"It has been very dry around here for the past several weeks," Walsh said. "We didn't have a lot of runoff, and even if we did have a lot of runoff, it would affect downstream, not necessarily right here in Memphis."

Walsh said although the river has reached a new low, the river should continue to get lower, although some precipitation upstream from Memphis could result in a small boost to the water level.

Kentucky Dam and Barkley Dam on the Cumberland River form Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, surrounding Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area in western Kentucky, about three hours north of Memphis.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: TVA to release water into Mississippi River amid record low levels