Caution: building in a wetland can be hazardous to your house

National Wildlife, June-July, 1998 by Michael Lipske

Developers are nibbling away at the nation's small wetlands, creating big problems in the process for many homeowners

"Build your house in a wetland, and you've got a hobby for the rest of your life," warns Ed Perry. "You will be fighting that water forever."

A student of flooded basements and cracked foundations, Perry knows what he's talking about. While investigating illegally filled wetlands in Pennsylvania for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the biologist has visited plenty of houses built where water naturally flows and has commiserated with sorrow- ful owners of sodden split-levels. The lesson, says Perry, is that home builders who tamper with even small wetlands can have big problems.

The trouble Perry uncovers should never take place. Wetlands are superb at purifying polluted water, replenishing aquifers and harboring wildlife. But they are almost always terrible places to build houses.

Only about 5 percent of the land area in the continental United States is com- posed of wetlands. But these transitional zones--neither completely dry nor entirely liquid--are enormously valuable, especially when it comes to control- ling floods. Wetlands act like natural sponges on the landscape, absorbing and then gradually releasing storm waters and lessening flood damage.

In the Midwest, where thousands of homes were struck by devastating floods in the early 1990s, more than 17 million acres of wetlands have been built on or plowed under in the Mississippi and Missouri river basins; an FWS study found that those destroyed wetlands could have contained enough river water to flood 1,000 football fields to a depth of more than four miles. Instead, much of that water poured over levees and into people's homes.

When wetlands are filled, the water that made them wet has to go somewhere. If it isn't seeping back into the basement of the house built on the former wet- land, the water likely is leaking into formerly dry homes of downstream prop- erty owners.

That's exactly what happened not long ago in the Pocono Mountains in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, after a developer drained a half-acre forested wetland and then dug a channel down the middle of the property. Thanks to that ditch, "the sponge wasn't acting like a sponge anymore," says Craig Todd, manager of the Monroe County Conservation District. Storm water sluicing through the drained wetland "ended up creating the largest eroded gulley in our county," he says. It clogged municipal culverts and flooded out two houses downstream.

Ed Perry has prepared numerous reports studded with photos of seasonal wet- lands--some of them "sites you need hip boots to get into," he says--where unscrupulous builders have tried to peddle housing lots during dry months. The situation is compounded by a national policy that gives blanket approval to developers to build homes and other structures in many small wetlands.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' nationwide permit program was set up in 1977 to provide developers and other potential wetland fillers with quick responses for modest projects. The idea was to spare citizens from red tape while they sought approval from the Corps (which regulates wetlands activities under the federal Clean Water Act) for projects that have only slight impact on the environment. But critics of the nationwide permits say the program destroys thousands of acres of valuable wetlands a year, usually in the form of small wetlands.

"Most of the filling that goes on throughout the country is relatively small--fills of less than a half acre," Perry says of the nickel-and-dime approach to destroying natural resources.

To Tony Turrini, a National Wildlife Federation attorney specializing in wet- land regulations, the small, seemingly harmless fills allowed by the Corps' nationwide permit program represent a critical problem. "What we're talking about is piecemealing away the resource," says Turrini. "It's a piece here, a piece there, but cumulatively we're seeing extremely significant losses." Even without considering the natural benefits wetlands provide, the fact remains that building in such areas makes little sense.

One of the most controversial Corps permits--known as Nationwide Permit 26--allowed for the filling of as many as 10 acres of wetlands under certain circumstances. Environmentalists long criticized Nationwide Permit 26 as the cause of more than half of all wetlands destruction every year in this coun- try. Under threat of a lawsuit from NWF and other groups, the Corps recently agreed to phase out the permit over the next two years.

Now another permit--Nationwide Permit 29--has come under fire from conserva- tionists. Adopted by the Corps in 1995, the permit gives expedited approval for filling as much as one-half acre of wetlands for construction of single-family homes and such attendant features as septic systems or pools.

"With Nationwide Permit 29, the Corps has said half-acre fills are inherently insignificant," says Turrini. "But lots of studies document that playa lakes, prairie potholes and vernal pools--all wetlands that are often less than one-half acre in size--have very significant environmental values."