As the Mississippi River creeps back into its usual banks and a collective sigh of relief is being breathed after the historic flood of 2011, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and state levee officials are looking to the future with a wary eye on what size wallet they’ll be given to maintain levees if and when another potential calamity arises.

“You’ll never hear the Corps complain about money,” said Peter Nimrod, engineer with the Board of Mississippi Levee Commissioners. “They can handle anything, and they can do it. But the reality is they really need some more money — there’s no doubt about this.”

No doubt, the Corps’ top brass is happy with the way the levees along the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers held up during the flood that officially began in Vicksburg on May 1 when the river topped the 43-foot flood stage and ended when it dropped below that mark Thursday night and was at 41.3 feet Saturday night.

“I’m reassured,” said Col. Jeffrey Eckstein, commander of the Corps’ Vicksburg District, during a post-flood tour of the mainline and backwater levees north of the city.

The second-year commander lauded the system’s performance overall despite a recurring mainline trouble spot and several boils a few miles north of Vicksburg near Lake Albemarle as the river climbed to a record high of 57.1 feet at Vicksburg on May 19. Statistics from the Corps show about 150,165 acres in Warren County took on water during the flood’s peak, which translates to 234.6 square miles. The figure includes two largely uninhabited areas on each side of the river, Davis Island and Kings Point, used mainly for hunting and tree farming.

“It’s impressive that people designed this system way back when and it got upgraded over time,” Eckstein said. “The engineers got it right, maintained it. Like anything else, you gotta maintain something that’s designed. If you don’t do the maintenance on it, it’ll slowly degrade.”

The sigh of relief was obvious as the Corps and others remembered predictions in late April and into May that the integrity of the giant levee system could be compromised by the rising rush of water gushing in from record snow melt in the upper Midwest and spring rain totals in the Ohio River Valley that shattered norms by up to 1,000 percent.

For Nimrod, whose engineer crews help maintain 163 miles of mainline levees from Bolivar County to its southernmost tip at Buck Chute, west of Eagle Lake, and the 28-mile Yazoo Backwater Levee, the return to flood stage means giving thanks.

“After the ’27 flood, Congress set up the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project. It took a long time to put all the features in place,” Nimrod said. “This year, all the floodways were utilized, the Birds Point levee was blown up, all the features were utilized as part of the plan.”

The Corps’ Memphis District began moving dirt Thursday to rebuild the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway frontline levee in southeast Missouri, which was dynamited May 2 to protect massive flooding in Cairo, Ill. On Tuesday, the New Orleans District began closing the 330 bays opened on the Bonnet Carre Spillway in St. Charles Parish, La., which diverts river flows into Lake Pontchartrain. One of the 17 gates opened at the Morganza Floodway remains open. The structure diverted river overflow into the Atchafalaya Basin and was opened only once, in 1973, prior to this year’s flood.

In fiscal 2012, the Corps will have fewer dollars to work with when it’s time to raise levees and reinforce river banks — $100 million less than what was authorized in 2010 for the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project. The most pressing needs for the mainline and backwater structures north of Vicksburg involve work at three places – a stronger closure for chronic seepage at Buck Chute, raising 2.7 miles of levee and reinforcing areas near Lake Albemarle and leveling the 28-mile Yazoo Backwater Levee so the earthen barrier is 107 feet above sea level from end to end. No time frame is set for any of the tasks.

Given the limited funding and methods of prioritizing work based on cost and need, it could mean tighter competition for funding between Corps districts, Eckstein said.

“We’re doing these evaluations across the region,” Eckstein said. “This may be important to us, but it may not be as important as something in the Memphis area or down in New Orleans. But, we’ll make sure we have the right engineering solution to match funding available.”

At Buck Chute, the river has long sought an underground avenue to Eagle Lake, which was once part of the main river channel.

In 1997 and 2007, the Corps put in relief wells to ease pressure from water seeping through the soft supporting soil.

Then, as the first forecast of this year’s historic flooding came in, a contract in the works since 2010 to build a sand berm and relief wells after hunters discovered boils was kicked into overdrive, Nimrod said.

“This was considered the weakest part of our whole levee system,” Nimrod said. “We really were grateful the Corps’ came in and built this water berm. We sure didn’t want to have a levee failure at our weakest spot. You would lose all these houses at Eagle Lake and then all the way north of Rolling Fork.”

A 2-acre berm, minus the wells, was built “as insurance” to enclose the boil as the Muddy Bayou Control Structure was opened to elevate Eagle Lake about 12 feet above normal stages.

Now, the Corps hopes to jump-start work on the original contract to install a smaller, 1,500-foot long berm with 25 relief wells using this year’s funding — possibly awarding a contract by late September or early October, Eckstein has said. Stages on the lake were to be lowered this weekend and gates on Steele Bayou Control Structure, which held 16 feet of water out of the 4,093-square mile Yazoo Backwater Area during the flood, were opened on Saturday.

“The goal is to get that contract awarded this fall and get the construction going right away,” he said.

The backwater levee, completed five years after 1973 flooding devastated the South Delta, is designed to overtop and it’ll remain that way.

Backwater transformed vast low spots along U.S. 61 North into inland lakes — but rose to 106.66 feet against the levee, leaving about 4 inches of unexpected “freeboard.”

Water reached the levee’s gravel road only in a few low spots near Steele Bayou, and a polyvinyl mat designed to prevent water from scouring the north side of the levee still covers the barrier’s westernmost 4 miles. Options for the mat involve either disposal or recycling it, Eckstein said.

“We know we don’t want to leave it out there as a permanent feature, so we’re working with manufacturers and recyclers to remove it, do something with it,” Eckstein said.

“The backwater feature did what it was supposed to do,” he said. “Luckily, it didn’t overtop. The big thing is we didn’t have any rainfall.”

Rainfall in Vicksburg for May totaled .97 of an inch, nearly 5 inches below normal for the month, according to preliminary data from the National Weather Service.

Raising the levee at Lake Albemarle, where about 300 feet of landside levee slid away, is already programmed and would represent a next step in a decades-long project that has raised 40 out of 69 miles of mainline levee in Mississippi that were deemed too low after the 1973 flood, Nimrod said. Five sand boils “popped out” on the levee May 16, prompting the Corps to lay about 7,000 tons of rock and 11,000 tons of sand to shore up and fill the gaps. Maintaining the emergency work and raising the levee would be best, but may be a stretch due to funding.

“There’s a chance we’ll stay just like this,” Nimrod said of the project. “You can’t really jump on it, because you don’t know what the answer is (on funding).”