Unnatural disasters - areas that suffer repeat flooding yet continue to rebuild

Sierra, May, 1999 by Bob Schildgen

We can't stop rivers from flooding. But we can stop making the floods worse.

The Deluge is ancient, universal, inevitable. Stories of a catastrophic flood were told 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, and have been recited from desert to rainforest, from the Natives of Australia to the Maya in Central America. In

many of these myths, the flood is a punishment for the sins of humanity.

What sins are we suffering for now? Floods are so frequent and intense that it seems we've returned to the drenched mythic dreamtime. The trouble begins with a deep snow cover in the mountains, a quick spring thaw on the prairie, a sudden downpour, a relentless gray month of steady rain. As waters rise, people in the floodplain anxiously listen to weather reports and upstream flood measurements, and watch the muddy torrents on the news. Then comes the desperate sandbagging, pumping, bulldozing, emergency levee building. Families flee to high ground before roads and bridges wash out. Homes, farms, and businesses are ruined, submerged or ripped away in a rush of water and mud.

The human cost can be read on the faces of those huddled in makeshift shelters and school gyms, and heard in their dazed accounts of loved ones who disappeared under the waves. Our sense of what is important changes: in Grand Forks, North Dakota, a police officer boats to his ruined house, and steps out of the water into his second-story window to save his wife's wedding dress. There is heroism and sacrifice and community solidarity. One after another, survivors tell how the sundering flood made them closer than before.

Then the politicians arrive by boat and helicopter, looking grave and rugged in their flannel shirts and hunting caps and outdoor gear, The president declares a disaster, and another relief effort begins.

We call these disasters "natural" and even "acts of God." True, rivers always have and always will overflow their banks. But there is increasing evidence that human hands are roiling the already angry waters; we have forgotten the ancient lesson that floods are the price we pay for our own actions.

In an attempt to save ourselves, we build not arks, but massive dams and levees that enable us to live and farm on the lands where the water belongs. This reflexive reliance on technical fixes is notorious for ruining vital natural ecosystems. Dams obliterate river valleys, turning them into artificial lakes, while levees cut off rivers from riparian habitat. Moreover, these remedies can defeat their purpose. A growing number of flood watchers warn that excessive dependence on structures actually aggravates floods, as does our destruction of water-storing wetlands and reckless development of floodplains. We spend billions, first to prevent floods and then to recover from them, but much of that money is merely subsidizing disaster.

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT DOES

more to promote floods than any other entity. More than 40 separate federal programs and agencies, governing everything from highway construction to farm export policy, encourage building and farming on floodplains and wetlands. In 1996 alone, according to an analysis by Sierra Club Midwest representative Brett Hulsey and the National Wildlife Federation's David Conrad, over $7 billion was poured into ten programs that aggravate flooding. "So much subsidy goes into the development of floodplains that there's no incentive to stay out," says Nancy Philippi, vice president of the Wetlands Initiative in Chicago.

Between 1960 and 1985, the federal government spent $38 billion on flood control, yet average annual flood damage--adjusted for inflation--continued to increase, more than doubling. Since 1990, damages have averaged more than $5 billion a year. When rains pounded the Upper Mississippi watershed for days on end in the spring of 1993, the cost was $6.5 billion. When a "Pineapple Express" from the subtropical Pacific dumped heavy rains on California and brought on the New Year's Flood of 1997, rivers swelled and broke or overtopped many stretches of California's thousands of miles of levees--just as they had in the Midwest--at an estimated cost of $1.7 billion. When the Red River, which flows up through the prairie between North Dakota and Minnesota, flooded later that year, another $3 billion in damages was added.

The human toll is also staggering. More than 500 people have been killed since 1993 in the Great Midwest Flood and the many floods that followed, a loss that would have been far higher without modern weather forecasting and communications to spread the word to sandbag or flee.

THE TRADITIONAL DEFENSE

against floods is to treat them as a plumbing problem. Dams are built to contain the water, and levees--mounds of earth, riprap, or concrete along the banks of the river--seek to confine it. When another 100-year flood comes ahead of schedule and washes these structures away, they are rebuilt bigger and stronger.

The bulk of the $4 billion annual budget of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency primarily responsible for flood control, goes to building and maintaining waterworks. The Corps boasts that its dams and 8,500 miles of levees have saved some $387 billion in damages since 1928. No similar assessment exists of the damages wrought in areas where Corps projects encouraged development that was later inundated.