Slashdot Mirror
The Intentional Flooding of America's Heartland
Hugh Pickens writes "Joe Herring writes that sixty years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began the process of taming the Missouri by constructing massive dams at the top to moderate flow to the smaller dams below, generating electricity while providing desperately needed control of the river's devastating floods. But after about thirty years of operation, as the environmentalist movement gained strength throughout the seventies and eighties, the Corps received a great deal of pressure to include specific environmental concerns into their Master Water Control Manual, the 'bible' for the operation of the dam system, as preservation of habitat for at-risk bird and fish populations soon became a hot issue among the burgeoning environmental lobby. The Corps began to utilize the dam system to mimic the previous flow cycles of the original river, holding back large amounts of water upstream during the winter and early spring in order to release them rapidly as a spring pulse. 'Whether warned or not, the fact remains that had the Corps been true to its original mission of flood control, the dams would not have been full in preparation for a spring pulse,' writes Herring. 'The dams could further have easily handled the additional runoff without the need to inundate a sizable chunk of nine states.' The horrifying consequence is water rushing from the dams on the Missouri twice as fast as the highest previous releases on record while the levees that protect the cities and towns downstream were constructed to handle the flow rates promised at the time of the dam's construction."
This story sounds like a red herring.
What surprized me is that the levees are such exceptionally feeble things.
And you're dammed if you don't.
Growth and over population are at the root of this. We can not destroy nature and yet we need land urgently to raise crops and house the ever rising population. Science can not save us form total stupidity. Roll back birth rates and leave larger sections of the land unaffected and free of human uses or else we will pay a price we can not afford.
Move out of the flood zones or buy flood insurance. Its no different than the people that blamed the Army Corps when New Orleans flooded. Wake up people, you're living below sea level (New Orleans) or living in the 100 year flood plain (Midwest). What did you really think was going to happen?
"Like the stern lights of a ship, it illuminates only the track that is passed"
Sen. Blunt characterized the current flooding as "entirely preventable" and told reporters that he intends to force changes to the plan.
Given the volume of water the Corps is trying to manage, that statement is unbelievable hogwash. Ignorance that goes far beyond the people who try to argue "intelligent design" has a scientific basis. It reminds me of the attempts to blame poor neighborhoods for the mortgage crisis, even though the overall default rate in poor, minority neighborhoods was lower than upper-middle class white neighborhoods.
Couldn't have anything to do with snow pack and rainfall being over double the norm, it's got to be those dang environmentalists.
Using natural and man-made disasters to demigod your political opposition. We really have turned into a pathetic bunch. This tripe doesn't belong on Slashdot.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Yes, I recommend that - I married one.
From reading the article, it sounds like the major cause of the flooding was not using the flood controls in the dam system but rather releasing water at twice the previous rate (150,000 ft^3 verse a peak of 75,000ft^3) which was not planned for in the downstream levies.
Nature floods, civil engineering prevents (or diminishes the risk) this from happening. Preventing this flooding opens up more land for crops.
Letting the world go back to nature means that billions of people would starve. The price we can not afford is letting 13 out of every 14 people starve, (going from a population of 7 billion back to 500 million).
I've read several articles from this site forwarded by a friend. The articles were biased, used slippery slope logic, etc.
Now they are leveraging slashdot to boost their Google ranking.
Editor, please?
If you don't want to get flooded don't live on a fucking flood plain.
Systems built around "average" rainfall will fail eventually because the climate is NOT stable on a year to year basis. You either build levees and dams for a once in a thousand years worst case scenario or you accept you will get the occasional massive flood that overwhelms systems built around "average" rainfall.
What actually happens is the dams and levees get built to handle the last major flood. That plan failed in Queensland Australia at the beginning of this year.
People need to accept that they don't have absolute control over their lives. Nature happens.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
No don't do it that only makes more of them
Yeah. Yeah. Well I happen to live in Bismarck, one of the cities currently flooding. Although I sure they would have done things differently now, they have always warned this town that this was a possibility. Every time a huge development went in down by the river, the Corps was against it, but money talks and the city and county commissioners approved the measure, drooling over the taxes they'd get from million dollar houses on 150,000 dollar lots. I mean these people built several peninsulas of land out into the river so everyone could have water access. They took a great wetland area next to the river and forced its destruction through the meetings. This has happened on dozens of occasions, and now they are all yelling at the Corps. The Corps has constantly taken heat for the dam being too empty the last few decades and not considering tourism. The meetings have been rancorous to say the least. I'm not a big Corps fan having been in a bit of trouble with them myself (camping while canoeing on corp land) but let's put the blame where it really lies. With the developers who masterminded restructuring a river for their own profits. The Blessed Atheist Bible Study @ http://blessedatheist.com/
Hmm, the american thinker article seems pretty trollish, utilizing descriptions that I would generally find in political hate speech, blaming environmentalists for the flooding. The articles point isn't to find root cause, but to spread hate at environmental groups.
A quick google search reveals that the american thinker is indeed a conservative online magazine. I would hope that folks realize there is a war of information out there between extremes of the political spectrum and that we are better off not spreading those words of hate. The extremists are always going to be looking to enlist you in their war, by claiming the other side is outrageous.
Perhaps if they had not been holding back water for future electricity generation, there would be adequate capacity for both the Spring pulse and flood control. Seems silly blame the fish for the water.
Can be found here.. http://www.dnr.mo.gov/env/wrc/docs/MasterManualMarch2006.pdf
It's high time that "the Heartland" pulled their heads out of Jeebus's butthole long enough to realize that we're fucking up our climate. FUCK EM.
Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes? Did Slashdot review his scholarship here and give it a stamp of approval, or was it just put up on the website, leaving it to the readers to decide whether it's B.S. or not?
No qualifications or expertise are claimed for Joe Herring on the website. In fact no information on his background is given except that he is "from Omaha, NE." This is highly unusual for a publication that hopes to be taken seriously. We don't even know if that is his real name.
We are left to judge the value of this Joe Herring essay by his previous contributions and by the reliability and reputation of the website that publishes his work.
Joe Herring is, in short, a right-wing nut.
He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution: "The continuum on the left that ranges from the 'wouldn't it be nice if we all just smiled' types to the hardcore authoritarian communists may disagree about methods, but sadly, all agree on one thing: if their utopia is to come about, the Constitution -- and the form of government derived from it -- must be replaced with...something."
He says the Nazis were left-wingers: "The Left will not willingly lay claim to the true legacy of socialism, so we will have to hang it around their necks."
He believes that the true goal of health care reform, renewable-energy subsidies, and regulations on Wall Street is for "the left" to seize power and exterminate half of the human race. Really: "As the federal government asserts control over health care, energy production, and the financial markets, the trinity of power is within the left's grasp. Unless driven back from their goals -- and quickly -- the likelihood grows daily that more than four billion of our 'species' will be joining the table scraps and yard clippings on the compost pile."
He thinks the problem with Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year, "death panels," is that the right wasn't lying hard enough: "To describe this board as a 'death panel,' as Rush Limbaugh has, is to underestimate its power and misconstrue its purpose."
And five minutes with Google reveals that American Thinker is a source that, shall we say, lends no additional credibility to Joe Herring's contributions. Take global warming as a typical example. They printed essays claiming to have found a "smoking gun" that disproves global warming (wrong). Then they found another single argument that by itself disproves global warming (still wrong). They argue that global warming is a Nazi lie.
This "intentional flooding" piece looks like yet another right-wing hit job on leftism. I would be happy to entertain the idea that misguided environmentalism is partially to blame for one disaster or another, but I would like to hear a reasoned argument from someone who's not a nut.
"'Whether warned or not, the fact remains that had the Corps been true to its original mission of flood control, the dams would not have been full in preparation for a spring pulse,'"
There's another aspect. Over time people have learned that if you completely moderate the annual flow of a river by flood control, the channels will silt up, whereas if you have a higher peak flow in the spring, the channels get flushed out. You may say "big deal, let them silt up", but allowing the channels to silt up means the channel itself has less capacity to contain the river's peak flows (less cross-sectional area), and there is a tendency for the bottom of the channel to get shallower, meaning that when the flood waters come, the levees on the banks are easier to overtop. Alternatively you can build those levees ever higher, the river bed silts up some, you build the levees higher again, and eventually the river gradient (slope) is reduced so much that when a levee failure does happen, the bottom of the river bed is well above the floodplain, and the whole thing drains out onto the floodplain even more catastrophically. This is what happens in some parts of China because of many centuries of levee building -- the river is perched high above the floodplain (e.g., the lower parts of the Yellow River).
Maintaining something that emulates the natural seasonal flow of the river in a moderated way is an important technique to maintain the system over the long-term in a more manageable state than if you adopt the principle to contain absolutely everything at all times and all circumstances. Peak spring flow flushes the system out. It's not a bunch of idealistic environmentalist/hippies constraining the engineers, it's the engineers themselves realizing the limitations of their previous approach, and that if they ignore what the river does over the long term, it will get harder and harder to control and eventually they'll lose the battle anyway. It's better to understand how the system works and adapt to it.
In short, don't believe a politician knows how the hell to manage a river system, or that they care much about what their decisions today will mean 20 or 50 years down the line, rather than the next election. You'd think a former history teacher would have a sense of perspective on these things. Blaming it on "environmentalists" is just a cheap political ploy.
The blog/post/whatever-that-was implies a false dichotomy. Yes the original flood control dams were designed to control flooding (hence the name), yes subsequent environmental understanding caused the release cycle to be more pulsed than continuous. The solution isn't to choose between the two, the solution is to re-invest and rebuild portions to accommodate both.
The mass funding of infrastructure improvements (bridges, interstates, dams, power) from the 1930's to 1960's was a good thing but we can't view them as a one and done process. They not only take maintenance they also need to be redone as they age and new understanding of their effects arise.
We must start taking a longer view, if the replacement infrastructure cost of all of those things is 10 trillion dollars (or some other number) and their average life cycle due to aging or other factors is 50 years then we need to start replacing them on that cycle of 200 billion/year. Part of the problem is that so much infrastructure was placed in so little time (10 to 20 years) it's all coming due at once.
Sadly we take a short term, one and done approach, we have a dam, why would we ever need to rebuilt it.
Cheerup, this is only the beginning with warming global temperatures, the atmosphere holding more moisture, more intense and frequent storms, yada yada yada.
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if all your folly were changed to intelligence and divided amongst a thousand toads, each would be more intelligent than Aristotle.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
The damns and levees themselves are the root of the problem here. Just as New Orleans once had a natural barrier to hurricanes (ie the Mississippi Delta) that was eroded by levees and dams, the rivers have flood plains upon which we decided to dump cities on. You can get away with living on a flood plain to a certain extent, but erecting dams and levees simply silts up the river and effectively EXPANDS the floodplain and makes flooding more likely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_dwelling_hill
An artificial dwelling hill ("Terp"), created to provide safe ground during high tide and river floods.
In 500 BC it was for keeping there feet, food and livestock dry, but it should work for computers, wide-screen TV's and SUV's just the same.
what additional engineering measures will need to be
incepted and retrofitted to this system of dams in order to modernize them
in light of global warming and climate change?
had this system not been built, what would america have been like?
has our recent industrial farming (recent meaning ~30 years) affected the outcome of this system any?
how can it/should it scale in the future?
sure, the source of the article is ominous and i take anything i hear from someone who
tries to politicize or modernize the third reich with a grain of salt...but as slashdot readers we owe
it to ourselves to study the article with an objective scientific mind.
Good people go to bed earlier.
http://www.omaha.com/article/20110626/NEWS01/706269898/1003211
Why is it not politically correct to beat the hell out of hippie enviro freaks? We just need to tell these people to SHUT UP! If they want to crunch granola in the back of their Eco Car that's their business. Letting these douche's dictate policy is just plain DUMB!
Perhaps the environmentalists should be forced to explain why their pet cause is more important than the farms and properties that were flooded due to their brow beating of the Corps of Engineers to the people who were flooded.
Since you're probably not a pure bred American Indian, I hope you show us by example and move back to the country your parents, great grand parents or great-great grand parents immigrated to the US from. Do let us know when you plan to leave. Too bad the American Indians couldn't control immigration. You are the product of immigrants who took control of what is now the US using the policy of genocide (aka Manifest Destiny), and now you complain about immigrants. This is not to mention your buying and selling black people (slaves) for so many years. An immigrant blaming immigrants. That is really rich....
You, sir, win the internet today.
The corporate overlords demand it!. When you buy an house, you borrow money from a big corporation. That big corporation makes you buy "insurance" from another big corporation. The individual has no say, you can buy a policy from Tweedledum of Tweedledee, but both have the business model of denying claims. 1. Collect premium. 2. Loss hits homeowner. 3. Deny claim. 4. PROFIT!
http://water.weather.gov/ahps2/crests.php?wfo=oax&gage=blan1
Shows that of all of the times the Missouri River crested at a historic level near the town of Blair, 29 of them occurred between 1980 and now.
To say that this is a "snowmelt" problem is asinine at best. There is definite manipulation and misuse of the dams beyond their original intent.
Bear in mind the environmentalist movement really gained steam during the 30yr time frame of the 1980's - present.
Tourism also has significant blame in this, as local governments want full lakes during the busy seasons, despite the long term effect.
Good points. But silting up is potentially worse than you describe because when "the bottom of the river bed is well above the floodplain" the river can change its course. Perhaps mere miles. Perhaps dozens or hundreds of miles. Often permanently.
Without the spring pulse, river cities could become high and dry, and non-river cities could find themselves underwater for a hundred years. Somewhat randomly.
That is what meandering rivers in flattish floodplains naturally do, even without levees. Mis-managed levees make the process even more exciting, while offering a veneer of apparent safety
If not for the Army Corps of engineers, New Orleans itself could have already become a city in the arm pit of a swamp, and not adjacent to the Mississippi anymore.
Are the communities that live on the river okay with those kinds of changes, instead of the relatively ordered flooding we have now?
Recommended reading on this topic: The Control of Nature, by John McPhee (1990 - written before the massive flooding on the Mississippi in the 1990's). In particular, read chapter on the development of locks and dams on Mississippi River to understand the dynamics of water systems and how we have impacted them.
Basically, you are claiming that the original Flood Control Manual did not account for the natural phenomenon of silting. Since you seem to imply (as I read it) that silting must be done with great frequency (i.e. that the current flood is inevitable as you could not wait until a less floody year) then presumably it should have collapsed several times already until silting became part of common knowledge.
Oh, the irony that the average Slashdot moderator mods +5 postings that basically say "Who is this person and why should we believe anything he says about flooding?", yet an AC assertion that the original manual did not account for silting is also +5.
ok people make up your fucking minds ether you get natural emulation or you get flood control
i live near garrison and i'm tired of hearing about things that the corps "needs to answer for" when it's wet the corps has to answer for draining from the dams to make room for the run off when it's dry the southern states on the river bitch that there's not enough water for barges and the northern states get bent over recreation on the reservoir
or my current personal favorite everyone thinking that when we get a half inch of rain that the corps didn't account for that and thus the state capital will be flooded from existence
it's time to pick one goal deal with it and let these people do their jobs that i guarantee they didn't know would be this thankless when they signed up
if you want flood control then deal with the habitat issue some other way if you want the habitat preserved well then get your waders out because there will be floods and when the dams have to drain they will be bigger and longer
this is life
deal with it
Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes?
Who the hell are Hugh Pickens and Timothy, and why should I trust anything they write/post? This is a blow to both their reputations; this is really embarrassingly low quality stuff. Maybe they could respond to this thread. Pickens has no excuse; clearly he read the article in detail and was either taken in or wanted to promote it; I hope Timothy simply didn't review the post carefully -- unfortunately, would not be a first on Slashdot.
I get the sense that I've seen a few right-wing conspiracy theories on Slashdot's front page recently. Slashdot always seemed to be about open inquiry and not politicized conspiracies. Hopefully it stays that way.
Yeah, all dem 'snake-worshiping flood-frolicking GREEN bytch-boyz need a solid bytch-slapping' because the water you drink doesn't catch on fire (Cuyahoga river, frac'ing polluted water in southern New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Wyoming) and the air you breath does cause burns to your lung tissue (Huston area, Los Angles)
Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes? ...
Who the hell are Hugh Pickens and Timothy, and why should I trust anything they write/post? ...
I should clarify something: My point was that we should ask the same skeptical questions about Hugh Pickens and Timothy and so I mimicked the language of the OP. Needless to say, most people on Slashdot know who they are and they have long reputations for their contributions. This front-page post may be a "blow" to their reputations, but their reputations are much bigger than one post.
Let's try a couple of explanations:
The first option: 1) massive winter snows overload the Ohio and Mississippi River system and cause widespread flooding 2) the Corp holds back Missouri River water to avoid sending even more water downstream and adding to the problem 3) an unusual winter precipitation pattern over the northern Rockies, Big Horns, and the northern high plains does not end as expected based on historical patterns and continues to dump even more rain and snow into an already near capacity system 4) mainstem reservoirs fill to record capacity (over 100% in some cases) and outflows must be increased to match inflows or the integrity of the dams and the associated safety of everything along the river system from Montana to New Orleans is at risk.
OR
The second option: some no-name, no-credentialed wing-nut claims environmental conspiracy based on nothing but opinions and idiot-ology.
Gee willikers mouseketeers, which explanation makes more sense to you? Study Mr. Herrings claims with a scientific mind? I have and they are devoid of fact or applicable knowledge.
Now has the Army Corp managed the river system well ? No, they - and we as a society - are guilty of hubris for thinking we can control a natural force as powerful as the Missouri River over the long haul. But, believing the river was controlled, people from Montana to St. Louis have built out into the flood plain to the very banks of the river. And are now shocked that this flood has come to pass.
But regardless of "why", thousands of our fellow citizens are losing their homes and possessions and in some cases their lives. Some communities will not recover. We should focus our energies towards helping them. We can always debunk wing-nuts later on.
When I was last in Florida, I noticed that a lot of buildings built near the Gulf have kind of a "disposable" ground floor -- either nothing, used as a car port but open on both ends, or what amounted to the same with a garage doors (presumably with some passive system designed to blow out in the case of a tidal surge to keep the structure from being pushed off its foundation.
Why don't they engineer buildings in flood plains along the same lines? Put parking and other empty concrete structures on a lower level so that the damage from water infiltration is minimized.
Sure, not every structure can be built this way and cost/benefit for some structures won't make it worth while, but it would seem that a great many, especially commercial structures could be.
Silting doesn't only hurt the ability of the system to flow downstream, it also kills navigation - which is part of the new MWCM.
The ACE was fucked from the start on this one.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Never got my head around river silting before so thanks for above as makes perfect sense ( particularly bit about the race between higher levees and silt level ). Can you point me to dummies guide to river and flood plain management from engineering perspective?
Using natural and man-made disasters to demigod your political opposition. We really have turned into a pathetic bunch. This tripe doesn't belong on Slashdot.
I was seeing regular ads here on slashdot (from townhall.com I believe) asking me to blame Obama for gas prices (nevermind they were down 10% at the time compared to 2 weeks prior). We've had all kinds of conservative articles on here over the past several months as well.
If this somehow strikes you as a new trend here on slashdot, I suggest you either should read the slashdot front page more often, or just stop. And no, I don't like slashdot's political bend either but it is what it is.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I live in North Dakota and my dad Travels to Montana often. There is water everywhere in ND and Montana. We have never, and I repeat, NEVER seen water anything like this. The rain and the snow pack these last two years have been incredible.
The fields are so wet many farmers have simply not planted their crops. This is coming from an area that for the majority of my life has been about 1 inch of rain away from being declared technically a desert (and in the drought years in the late 80's it was under the 7 inches of precip for 12 months).
Everything is flooding up here, the Missouri river, the Mouse River and all their tributaries. There is water being released from the Spillway on the Garrison Dam now. This is the spillway that was 1/4 mile away from the river on the river side just 5 years ago, this is the Spillway that had never been used since the Dam was built in 1953. I was just there a couple weeks ago. That river is full, and there is water coming out of the Rocky Mountains right now that is flowing more CFM than what they are releasing out of the Damn. This is as controlled as it can get.
There used to be 8 ways to get to my parents house, right now there is 1 as the rest of the roads are underwater (and we are 50 miles from the Missouri river, this is just slews and low areas accumulating rain water). Areas that I have never seen water in are now 8 foot deep lakes.
Just something to keep in mind. ND has been trying to get the Corps to hold back more water for over a decade as one of our main fisheries, the Missouri river, was down to the original river channel. The corps never listened and never held the water back, Mother Nature decided to give us all the water we could ever want, then she forgot to stop.
I have been raised to hate the way the Corps treat the river all my life, but in this instance they are doing everything that can be done to save as much property and as many lives as they can.
Suggested reading from a local:
Great River: An Environmental History of the Upper Mississippi River Valley Basin, authored by a Prof. at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
I read this about 20 years ago, and can't find a copy right here (St. Louis) ...
Yeah, I lost just about everything (even my UIUC BSPhysics diploma) in the floods, '93, all the way upstream in Urbana.
If the dam system was used as it was planned, and it was designed, instead of serving the interests of environmentalists (not saying we should abandon environmental concerns) - then this flooding would not have occurred.
Yeah right. Those 3 words were enough to set off the BS-o-meter. I can just see those megabuck environmental interests overwhelming the poor defenseless ag and energy industries who have no lobbying of their own. Riiiight.
that would be OK if this was the New Yorker, who has a staff of fact checkers go over every article before publication.
it would be OK if it was someone who had written under the supervision of an editor and fact checkers for 10 years, like sometimes happen when WSJ reporters go off and write a book.
it is not credible when you do it and you are just some anonymous person on the internet.
its fine to throw an opinion out there, but slashdot tends to only link to relatively reliable sources, people who at least know what they are talking about.
if its not a journalism website, its the blog of someone notable who has a lot of experience in some area.
not some random ranting blogger.
There sure are a lot of Anonymous Cowards posting in here...Not for nothing, but I'd rather know the name of the person I shouldn't be listening to (purportedly the author of the article) rather than be expected to trust anything said by someone who doesn't have the balls to post under their Slashdot name. Just sayin'...
My other thought for this thread in general is this: Dr. Ted Kaczynski (the Unibomber) expressed similar views in his "manifesto". He believed that technology was harmful to human society and he became an activist in an effort to "correct the problem". Many people in this thread would seem to agree with Kaczynski's ends but not necessarily his means.
If the dams weren't there, then we would have to think differently about living on flood plains. The alternatives include not to live on flood plains or build houses adapted to flood plains. With a large population and the availability of fertile land the former is not always an option, while the latter has worked in teaditional communities around the world. One of those designs is stilted houses, designed to be above the normal, and possibly maximum, flood levels for the region.
Certainly changing the building design to be adapted to the local geography would increase the short-term cost, but it potentially reduce long term costs, in terms of human lives, insurance and money paid out by the state.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Just... wow! I love the way the right-wing spin machine (because "American Thinker" is about as neutral as the negative pole of a DC battery) is now trying to blame systemic flooding resulting from anthropogenic climate change as being due to those bad environmentalists. On the other hand, I am happy that this article has been posted so that Slashfolk can see how low the right is willing to go to keep spewing carbon.
That is all.
And the dams not run by the Corps of Engineers? Specifically , Lake Darling in Saskatchewan, on the Souris River (Minot flood).
NB: The Souris river does not flow into the Missouri.
I was initially confused to see this on the front page. It does, as others point out, seem to be a bit of an inspired rant and is presented with little context other than as a starting point for further discussion. I would like to think that the purpose of an aggregate website like Slashdot is to filter nonsense with fact and relevance checking, then present the facts in context of some sort conducive to targeted further discussion. That's how we learn as a group.
I can only be thankful that the quality of the readers of this site is such that the first commentors did their own fact-checking a found this article to indeed, be half-baked. I'd like for Slashdot to remain a place that attracts readers with such high standards, too. So please editors, if you're out there, take a little more consideration. If we wanted inflammatory articles there's a whole internet out there full of them, that's what we're trying to avoid when we come to Slashdot in the first place.
You take your chances when you live in a river flood plain. The Army Corps can reduce the frequency of flooding but cannot eliminate it. People who live in flood plains would be wise to build on stilts like those in Carolina and Georgia, etc. I am puzzled why they do not.
an ill wind that blows no good
haha mod up
Which is more important, to protect the habitats of fish and birds or to protect the habitats of human beings?
I will always vote for the latter, because humans--people--are more important than animals. And be sure to consider that only a few people are responsible for habitat-altering policies and construction--only a tiny fraction of the people who may live or work in such areas. The rest are innocent, in terms of deciding to alter "the environment"; and given that people are more important, those people should not be harmed at "the environment's" expense.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
The dam built in Queensland was designed to alleviate the flood risk. It was not based on an average rainfall, it was based on the 1974 floods + fat. It covers 2 of the 3 catchments and would have meant an end to flooding were it not for human factors.
The damn originally dedicated some 10% of it's capacity to drinking water. During the droughts 5-10 years ago a decision was made to increase the drinking water capacity to 45% of the damn total capacity. This was again written into their bible.
Come one of the hardest storm seasons Queensland has ever experienced this damn was at 45% of flood capacity. It was at 45% of flood capacity before summer, it was at 45% after summer after several releases, and it was at 45% just before the floods.
THAT'S what failed in Queensland early this year. Brisbane and the valley would not have flooded were it not for the desire to have drinking water. The rivers would have risen yes, but not flooded. The engineering was sound, the politics were broken.
This is the second article I've seen on /. in the last few days which lacks any editing oversight into the nature of the article. Slashdot, this article is full of special-interest spin and has no place in serious conversation. This kind of crap is exactly what is wrong with our national conversation and doesn't deserve press. A little vetting of your sources and more intelligent critical thinking would be nice. If this junk continues to show up in my RSS feed I'll be replacing it.
Sometimes bugs are shallow even when many eyes are pointed the same way. "American Thinker" is the same rag that publishes articles claiming that the laws of thermodynamics are violated by aluminum foil.
Ironically, levees actually help to increase the flooding in certain areas - http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=levees-and-the-illusion-of-flood-co-2011-05-20
While levees are definitely important, they've been so overbuilt that bad floods are more likely to happen. Building levees to protect a flood plain means that you have a deeper river when it floods, and when the levee breaks the water will be higher in the part of the floodplain where it breaks.
Greg Pavelka, a wildlife biologist with the Corps of Engineers
Does US Fish & Wildlife have any hydrologists? It might help them to gauge the risks of certain policies if they engaged people that understood the consequences.
Anyhow, it doesn't take much digging on the Corps site to find stuff like this: The Pulse and the Mitigation. Read that and you get the impression the Corps is managing habitats first and flood risk somewhere below first. One of the few posts that cite 'law' as reasoning for their decisions.
Fuck the sturgeon. They've lived for 300 million years or whatever, they'll survive without flooding my house. If I ever catch one I'm killing it. If I see one of those stupid terns, its getting shot. When all the endangered animals are cleared out, we can control the river to protect people again.
Building in flood zones should not be allowed. Period. All it would take is not issuing government flood insurance for these areas, as no for profit company would take the risk. No bank would loan on anything not insured. In the end when we get floods, and we always will sooner or later, the damage would not be that expensive.
Wow, the Malthusian liberal line is out in force today.
Wow the unread and unlearned are out in force today.
Malthus was a conservative mounting an argument against what we might today call 'soclal welfare.' They'll only breed like rabbits anyway because they can't contain their lust, birthcontrol is worse than death (since it leads to eternal damnation), so the most charitable thing is to let the poor starve.
One release per year? They should move to a six-week release cycle.
This article and its assumptions are simply untrue. As someone who has been apart of research done on this dam system I can say for certain that they are not only not managed for environmental impact. Quite the opposite they store water during the spring so as to support barge traffic in late summer not to simulate natural flooding. As far as I know they have never simulated flooding on the Missouri.
Channel evolution isn't just determined by flow. The dams trap sediment in addition to regulating flow. Depending on the balance between the flows ability to move river bed sediments and the supply from upstream, the river channel may begin to silt in or may erode its bed (usually increasing channel capacity). In many portions of the Missouri River, erosion was the response to dam construction and continues to be a concern in some areas, such as Kansas City.
Likewise, the formation of perched channels in response to levee construction is most common in rivers with very high sediment loads, like the Yellow River and the Rio Grande. In other rivers, concentrating more flow in the channel by building levees will trigger channel erosion.
River engineering is a challenging field because the relationship between channel morphology, flow, and sediment transport is extremely complex and difficult to model. Channel evolution may proceed in opposite directions in different reaches of the same river and switch directions multiple times in response to a single change in forcing, such as dam construction. As a result, generalizations usually are not very useful.
Much of the major farmland flooded ... in the "floodplain" will result in far higher corn and wheat prices. So, the cost of being nice to birds, lizards, and the like is far higher food prices for people here at home. The Corps chose to flood prime farmland instead of wildlife preserves and the like. So, you will pay far higher food prices (along with everyone else). Food does not magically happen. It has to be grown. On that prime Mississippi river bottomland, or that prime Missouri River bottomland.
The Blessed Atheist Bible Study @ http://blessedatheist.com/
What does Atheism got to do with... well, ANYTHING about the flooding or the Army Corp of Engineers? More specifically, this topic in general? Smells like a shameless plug for yours or somebody else blog....
The cause of all this flooding has to do with the massive amounts of snow and rain had over last winter. Nobody had the ability to foresee that much water coming when these dams and levees were made many years ago. Atheist, Bible-thumper, or not. The Corp. could only make a guess and try to strike a cord between the environment and the developers.
The TL;DR: This was an unforeseen and not calculable event that even the best minds could have prevented back at the time these devices were made. There is nobody to blame but the ones trying to place blame.
The southwest tends to have a lack of enough water. Missouri & Miss rivers tend to have floods once in a while. Howabout building some reservoirs in the SW and pipe some of that extra water to there? I have no idea what that type of scheme that would involve, but it seems like a better way to spend money than fighting useless wars.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
My tax dollars are not there to pay for others dumb decisions.
All our tax dollars are paying for some catastrophically dumb decisions that were made back in 2002 and 2003, at a dramatically higher cost than flood repair has ever forced upon our country. I and many other opposed those decisions back then but we don't get to dictate our taxes won't be used to fund them anyways; that isn't how the federal budget works.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
lots of parameters that need adding - the lack of funding and political angles are a couple that are missing. and don't forget that the best that mankind has is partial control of a small part of mama nature.
Thanks for doing what I didn't care to do: read more Joe Herring. I already knew from the preview text that this was heavily slanted against the oh-so-overbearing and powerful environmental lobby [hahaha, I am looking at you, Dead Gulf of Mexico], so I didn't need to go any further.
I am all for reasoned discussions, too, not the rantings of an obvious troglodyte.
You left out the best part - the silting often collects high concentrations of heavy metals from natural and man-made sources, and chemical pollution. When channels get scoured by annual floods concentrations remain low, but when the sediment builds up, heavy metal concentrations build up. A lot of dams that could be torn down are left up just because of the problem of disposing of thousands of tons of heavy-metal contaminated sludge above them.
Good points. But silting up is potentially worse than you describe because when "the bottom of the river bed is well above the floodplain" the river can change its course. Perhaps mere miles. Perhaps dozens or hundreds of miles. Often permanently.
And often we take it upon ourselves to decide that the current course is the one to maintain, even if it would be less stable than allowing it to revert to historic courses.