WaterWired

Live, from Virginia Beach! Jim Karr's Words of Water Wisdom

Greetings from southeastern Virginia!

I am currently in Virginia Beach, one of the few "suburbs" that is more populous (by about double) than its central city Norfolk, where I am attending the AWRA's excellent Summer Specialty Conference Riparian Ecosystems and Buffers: Working at the Water's Edge.[Disclosure notice: I am on AWRA's Board of Directors.]

I am also seeing and smelling Great Dismal Swamp burn, another sign of the drought in this region. That is another story, however.

I'd forgotten how "warm" and humid SE Virginia can be in summer - I went to school just up I-64 at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg and spent a couple of summers down here. But today it's actually pretty pleasant.

But as usual, I digress. 

James R. Karr, Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, gave one of the keynote addresses on 30 June. I had never heard him speak but knew that he was one of the luminaries of ecology, although to call him an ecologist is a disservice to his eclectic work in a variety of fields: wetlands, fisheries, watershed management, public policy, tropical forest ecology, stream ecology, etc.

Karr is best-known for developing the Index of Biotic Integrity (IBI) a widely-used index originally developed for small warm streams in IN and IL. It has since been expanded and modified, and used to asess the condition of water resource systems.   

His talk, "Riparian Reflections" was essentially a well-ordered collection of thoughts and advice based on his years of experience. It was chock full of insight and take-aways. I got the strong impression that Jim does not suffer fools.

He urged us to define precisely what we're talking about, and to be careful when using terms like "pollutant" and "pollution".

Some examples of good advice to scientists and other professionals:

• Keep up with the advances in science, policy, and their interconnections
• Work with, and learn from others, especially those outside your own discipline
• Challenge dogma of ALL disciplines (including your own)
• Avoid hubris

Some perspectives on ecology:

• Mechanisms regulating ecological systems result from many weak forces acting probabilistically
• Cumulative effects are large but individual effects are minor, interactive, and uncertain.
• Beware of simplistic fixes (he cited TMDLs are an example)

So what's up with TMDLs (Total Maximum Daily Loads)? According to Karr, if you believe that chemistry is to blame for all the woes in waterways, then that's fine. But he likened putting your eggs in the TMDL basket to the following, where a patient sees a doctor:

• Patient: Doctor, I'm feeling ill.
• Doctor: Here, take this medicine. It'll fix you right up.
• Patient: But doctor, you haven't diagnosed my illness.
• Doctor: It's okay - I'm basing my treatment on the average illness I've seen in the past six months.

He exhorted scientists to speak up to policy- and decision-makers, and to be intolerant when bad science (or no science) is used to make decisions. He remarked that the "most impervious areas in watersheds" could be found in leaders' brains.

He is a big fan of the Clean Water Act and the Earth Charter Initiative. And he is adamant about examining biology to assess aquatic ecosystem condition. Can't argue with that.

All in all, my time was very well-spent. 

"We're not responsible for biology." -- an EPA official in the 1970s, responding to Karr's urge to look at biology to assess stream health

NYT: After 1993 Floods, Call for Change Ignored

In yesterday's New York Times, Monica Davey reported that after the devastating 1993 floods, calls for changes to the Mississippi River levee system went largely unheeded.

The photo, from the article, shows a Mississippi River levee breach near Meyer, IL.

Here's the beginning of the NYT article:

The levees along the Mississippi River offer a patchwork of unpredictable protections. Some are tall and earthen, others aging and sandy, and many along its tributaries uncataloged by federal officials. 

The levees are owned and maintained by all sorts of towns, agencies, even individual farmers, making the work in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri last week of gaming the flood — calculating where water levels would exceed the capacity of the protective walls — especially agonizing.

After the last devastating flood in the Midwest 15 years ago, a committee of experts commissioned by the Clinton administration issued a 272-page report that recommended a more uniform approach to managing rising waters along the Mississippi and its tributaries, including giving the principal responsibility for many of the levees to the Army Corps of Engineers.

But the committee chairman, Gerald E. Galloway Jr., a former brigadier general with the Corps of Engineers, said in an interview that few broad changes were made once the floodwaters of 1993 receded and were forgotten. {Note: Gerry Galloway is Past President of the American Water Resources Association.]

“We told them there were going to be more floods like this,” said Dr. Galloway, now an engineering professor at the University of Maryland. “Everybody likes to go out and shake hands on the levee now and offer sandbags, but that’s not helpful. This shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

While the committee’s recommendations certainly would not have prevented the Mississippi and its tributaries from rising to catastrophic levels, Dr. Galloway said they could have lessened the sense of helplessness and limited some of the damage.

Among the committee suggestions that Dr. Galloway said were largely overlooked: a more systematic approach to what the 1994 report described as “a loose aggregation of federal, local and individual levees and reservoirs” on these Midwestern rivers in which, that report said, “many levees are poorly sited and will fail again in the future.”

The multiple authorities responsible for the levees is a serious problem, along with the lack of coordination. When someone raises a levee, that will influence others.

“We always flood fight and raise levees during events like this with little or no coordination or regard for the impact it will have on people upstream or across the river,” said Paul A. Osman of the Illinois Office of Water Resources. “When you raise a levee, that water has to go somewhere.”

Many experts said it was impossible to know whether a comprehensive levee system might have changed things last week in the areas where water flowed over levees, in the endless corn and soybean fields near Meyer, Ill., or in the trailers and homes near Winfield, Mo. Many of the levees overflowed — as opposed to breaking up or splitting open first; they were simply overwhelmed by a huge amount of water. Some, along open lands, were always expected to overflow at such high water levels.

Still, Dr. Galloway said a broad, comprehensive flood management plan — the one presented 14 years ago — would have helped. “Some agricultural levees would still have overflowed,” he said. “But you would substantially have reduced the damage.”

Here is an interesting flood graphic from USA Today.

Here are some NPR stories (20 June and 23 June)  featuring Gerry Galloway:

Preventing the Next Natural Disaster and Mississippi River Flood Defense Lacks Funding

A very depressing tale indeed. Cicero said it best a few thousand years ago:

"We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history." -- Cicero

Aguanomics: 'Useless Gesture'

Check out this wonderful post on David Zetland's Aguanomics blog: what Sen. Barbara Boxer said in an email, and what she should have said.

Wishful thinking, I fear. Great job, David. 

"Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." -- Abraham Lincoln