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."
Are you a fucking idiot? Do you know the population densities of the areas being flooded? Some of these towns are literally in the middle of nowhere. But these towns, small as they may be are getting hammered by a flood that was avoidable if the Corps had stayed true to their mission of flood control.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with population, and everything to do with environmental whack jobs showing how truly stupid they are.
The Corps needs to be included in the dictionary alongside the term "epic fail".
Just because the first attempts were screwed up doesn't mean the idea isn't valid. It just means that it needs a bit more thought put into implimentation.
The beauty of the free market in action...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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.
> He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution:
Almost all leftists do. All Progressives believe the Constitution is an impediment to their goals, correctly. Why do I say such a thing? Because I read what they write and listen to what they say and they have been saying it pretty clearly for a hundred years. But don't believe me, might I refer you to the cover of the current Time magazine (where the burning question in the newsroom is whether they will fetch more than the $1 Newsweek recently sold for, but that is a snark best unleashed at another time) where the cover consists of a photo of the U.S. Constitution with the words "Does the Constitution still matter?" emblazened across it. If you bothered with the clueless prose of the article the answer hasn't changed since Woodrow Wilson's day.
Progressives want to 'progress' beyond the Constitution and can't be bothered with waiting for We The People to catch up to their wisdom so as to muster the supermajority of votes to amend it/rewrite it so they just decided to ignore it. When people wouldn't stand for that they invented the 'living Constitution' so they could claim they were obeying it.. i.e. they lied. They kept the familar forms of the old republic while discarding the meaning and used their control of the 'towering heights of the culture' to make it stick.... until the Internet, talk radio and cable TV smashed the progressive monopoly on mass media.
> He says the Nazis were left-wingers:
Yup, total insanity to think the National Socialist German Workers' Party is related to Progressives, Socialism and Communism. Most people here can read, yourself included. Some of us use the ability, you should try it. You might want to start with the Nazi Party platform. Compare and contrast to the current Democratic Party's platform and you might find enlightenment. The American Progressives (Wilson, FDR, the NYT et. al.) were totally in love with Italian Fascism and early Nazism. Most stayed in love with Hitler until the day he betrayed the pact with Stalin and attacked the Soviets. The Nazis didn't invent propaganda, they learned it from our own Progressives.
None of the above is opinion, it is historical fact. Fascism, Nazism, Socialism, Communism and our Progressive movement are all closely tied together by sharing most of their assumptions about human nature, the proper relation between man and the state, totalitarian, most of their moral code, etc. And if allowed to be fully implemented all lead to ruin and mass graves. We got to see it in Germany, the Soviet Union, etc. Thankfully we haven't seen the end state of Progressive ideas. .. yet.
> 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.
Did you read the article before the attacking the author and/or the publisher? Unless the quote is fabricated the government's own operations manual itself makes that claim in the highlighted boxed text I'll requote for you:
MWCM (Sec 7-07.2.6):
"Releases at higher-than-normal rates early in the season that cannot be supported by runoff forecasting techniques is inconsistent with all System purposes other than flood control. All of the other authorized purposes depend upon the accumulation of water in the System rather than the availability of vacant storage space."
Translated to English it says flood control was sacrificed to 'other authorized purposes.' Any questions?
Democrat delenda est