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Monday, February 20, 2006
We have met the enemy and he is us
Damn, but we are a nation intent on destroying ourselves. Remember the Mississippi River flooding in 1993? St. Louis doesn't:
Concentrated development in flood-prone parts of Missouri, California and other states has significantly raised the risk of New Orleans-style flooding as people snap up new homes even in areas recently deluged, researchers said Saturday.
Around St. Louis, where the Mississippi River lapped at the steps of the Gateway Arch during the 1993 flood, more than 14,000 acres of flood plain have been developed since then. That has reduced the region's ability to store water during future floods and potentially put more people in harm's way, said Adolphus Busch IV, a scion of the Anheuser-Busch brewing family who is chairman of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance.
...In the St. Louis area, there has been an estimated $2.2 billion in new construction on land that was under water in the 1993 flood, Pinter said.
We're making quite a few mistakes here. First, I think, is the assumption that since we just had the '93 flood, we're safe for another 90 years. Probability just doesn't work that way. The chance of a 100 year flood was the same in 1994 as it was in 1993 ... if not a little higher, thanks to global climate change.
The damning cycle, though, goes something like this. We build a levee to protect homes already in a flood plain. This makes the rest of the flood plain slightly safer and more valuable. This encourages more people to build in the flood plain. The increased development makes flooding more likely. Now we've got more people in a more dangerous area so we build a better levee to protect them. More people move in, the development increases the risk of flooding, and so on.
This cycle repeats until we have a real disaster. A flood of very predictable, but rare, proportions. Then we lose hundreds or thousands of lives and billions of dollars.
Then, the story reports, we forget all about it and start the cycle over.
1 Comments:
I don't know the history of federal flood insurance programs, but I wonder what housing was like in flood-prone areas before insurance. One possibility is that no one lived there. A second possibility is that people lived there who could afford to rebuild after a flood. A third, and I think most likely, possibility is that the most dangerous flood plains were inhabited by people who couldn't afford to live anywhere else.
If that's true, then national flood insurance could seem like a good short-term solution to help the working poor from losing everything in a flood. If that was the intent, the result has been quite different.
