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is not automatically exempt from paying for damage caused by temporary flooding from its dams.
• The court sided with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission in its appeal of a lower court ruling that said the federal government did not have to pay for damage

to thousands of trees after the corps released more water than usual from its dam on the Black River. The release of additional water benefited farmers, but the commission said its hardwood forest suffered significant damage.
• The commission said the damage amounted to the government taking its property, for which compensation would be owed under the Constitution.
• The Court of Federal Claims agreed and ordered the government to pay $5.6 million for destroyed and damaged trees. But the U.S Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington said damage resulting from temporary flooding, as opposed to permanent or inevitable flooding, cannot be compensated under the Constitution's Takings Clause.

• Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg disagreed with the appeals court, writing for the court that "government-induced flooding of limited duration, but severe impact, can amount to a taking of property warranting just compensation." But Ginsburg also cautioned that the court was not deciding that the government has to pay for all flooding caused by government action, or even necessarily in the Arkansas case.
• Murphy said he had been monitoring the Arkansas case closely after receiving repeated calls from frustrated Missouri River farmers. In 2011, the swollen river flooded about 207,000 acres of farmland in Missouri alone, and the lost crops cost the state's farmers nearly $110 million after crop insurance and other disaster payments, according to a report from an agricultural economist at the University of Missouri. Meanwhile, losses totaled $46.1 million in a six-county region of southwestern Iowa and $41.1 million in eastern Nebraska after crop insurance and other disaster payments, according to Farm Bureau reviews in those states.
• "Many of our clients felt they had been victimized by the flood," Murphy said.
• Mark Sitherwood, presiding commissioner of heavily damaged Holt County in northwest Missouri, said Tuesday that he was looking into personally joining the litigation. He lost his corn and soybean crop and was forced out of his home for a year.
• While praising the corps for restoring busted levees, he said, the agency could have reduced the damage if it had kept less water in its upstream reservoirs. He said county officials expressed concerns about the water levels in the reservoirs months before the flooding but were assured there was nothing to fear.
• "If they would have released a little bit earlier that year, we feel like that the se

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