Midwest Flooding: When Will We Learn?
What we need to do to prevent more disasters like this
Posted: 19-Jun-2008; Updated: 30-Jun-2008
This article is by Mary Kelly, the vice president of Environmental Defense Fund's rivers and deltas program.
When will we learn that trying to control Mother Nature is always more expensive, and less successful, than working with her? Once again, we are witnessing this futility – we spent billions of dollars on levees and flood control infrastructure to protect and encourage development of river floodplains and low-lying wetlands. Now we're watching those homes and businesses be overrun by flood water.
We saw it with the Mississippi floods in 1993, which caused billions in damages and forced tens of thousands from their homes. Now, here we are again, 15 short years later, and flooding in the Midwest is forcing thousands of people from their homes. It's causing billions in damages to hard-working farmers, putting historic downtowns under water and breaking or over-topping levees.
In between the 1993 floods and today's, we've also seen how levees failed to protect the residents of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina's storm surge. Spurred in part by those tragic events, the federal government recently assessed the integrity and protection level of thousands of miles of levees from coast to coast and found them seriously deficient [PDF].
Our heavy reliance on levees, which are hugely expensive to build and maintain, is sorely misplaced. It leads people to think that living in a floodplain is risk-free behind a levee touted as protecting them against a "100-year" or "500-year storm."
Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. As the time-worn refrain goes, there are only two kinds of levees, those that have already failed and those that haven't failed yet.
To make things worse, our choices have tended to make flood waters run faster, increasing the damage and danger. Levees narrow the river and speed it up. The near total loss of wetlands in the agricultural Midwest exacerbates the problem because those wetlands naturally stored stormwater and slowed runoff to streams and rivers. And the loss of riverside forests that also slow down and absorb flood flows into the ground has added to the current misery.
It's far past time to change our approach to flood protection. At all levels of government, here is what resources and incentives should be focused on:
- Buy-outs of vulnerable lands to decrease the people and property in harm's way
- Returning those lands to forests and wetlands to provide flood buffers
- Reform the taxpayer-funded National Flood Insurance Program to remove incentives for new flood plain development
- Better disclosure of the risks of living in flood plains, even for those lands behind a levee
- Reorienting our approach to flood protection, placing high priority wherever possible on the use of the river's natural floodplain instead of expensive engineered levee and pump systems
Mother Nature is trying to tell us something. Let's listen before she yells any louder.
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