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
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