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."
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.
What surprised me is that the people who originally lived in new orleans 100+ years ago because it was a nice smooth flat place found out why it was like that when it flooded the first spring. Instead of getting a clue and moving somewhere else, they just kept building there right up to today.
Hey dipshits, if I built a home in the mouth of a volcano, would anyone feel bad when it erupted?
And don't give me that stupid infographic of places where there is a 1% risk of tornado per year. New orleans is in the path of the biggest river in this country that has a 100% chance of floods every year.
Live somewhere else or quit crying when it floods, morons.
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?
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
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.
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.
True enough. Simple physics.
When it's warmer, the same volume of air, can hold more water-vapour, AND more water evaporates from warmer seas.
But when more water goes up, more water must also come down, it's not as if it -accumulates- up there. Thus we'll get heavier rainfall.
Best-case, some of that rainfall comes in areas that need it, and where it causes more good than harm.
But unavoidably, some of it will come down at inconvenient times and or inconvenient places.
Funny, thought NO was founded by the French missed the part where African nations colonized Louisiana and made that 'stupid' decision.
The city was not founded by blacks. Parent post may or may not be inspired by latent racism, but it is impossible to tell intent from the words as written.
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
http://www.omaha.com/article/20110626/NEWS01/706269898/1003211
Funnily enough, back then "niggers" didn't decide where people built houses. They built them, but it was whites that did designs, engineering and architecture.
So if that was indeed his intention, he sure shot himself in the foot.
No matter what, rebuilding on a flood plain is insanity. If you got a check from FEMA you owe it to yourself to take that check and spend it on something somewhere ELSE.
It has been argued that effort would best be spent relocating coastal cities. Let us not forget to depart the flood plains as well.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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....
Hm. When you are done relocating the coastal cities, the settlements in the flood plains, everyone in tornado alley, everyone along the San Andreas fault, every house on a mudslide prone slope, everyone in the danger area of an active volcano, all the towns in wildfire areas - where exactly do you stack the people?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
French? What are you talking about, I thought this used to be America! What's next? You going to tell me New York used to have some faggot ass unamerican name like "New Amsterdam" or something,
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
Did you eat today? Thank 'the Heartland'.
New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles (the skyscraper part, not the evil sprawl part), and Chicago. Anyone who doesn't fit can have excess parts removed. Dams and levees can fall apart naturally, farms and fields in the dangerous areas can return to woods and grasslands, and all the people in the sustainable, low-impact, short commute cities can still get their food from their local grocery stores.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Actually... http://gizmodo.com/5811834/what-if-you-crammed-the-entire-human-population-into-a-single-city/
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
no matter who did it (which, as we know, wasn't the "uppity niggers") it reminds me of a character from Holy Grail:
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
That is a ton of garbage.
Hoover Dam, for one, was built almost entirely by Depression era American citizens, the Manhattan Project had some foreign born persons in technical leadership positions, but it wasn't just a theoretical operation, three major sites and 30 secondary sites were constructed by US workers so the whole thing would work.
127 German scientists from Operation Paperclip worked on the US military and civilian rocket program, out of roughly 5600 total scientists.
As for Americans not being able to build anything durable, how do you explain the longevity of systems like the Boeing 737, 747, Abrams tank, Nimitz class aircraft carrier, the Chevy 350 small block engine, the GM 3.8 liter V-6 (aka Buick Fireball/Buick V6), F-15, 1911A1 pistol, the Jeep, the Intel x86 architecture, the original Macintosh, the IBM PC, etc
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!
I suppose the food is growing inside the local grocery stores, too?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Abrams tank
The M1 Abrams uses British developed Chobham armor. Just saying... :)
When you consider that nearly all of the original Jamestown colony died off its first winter, or that nearly all of Columbus' original colony died off due to violence...
Yeah, fuggit. Let's just all go home. Think the EU has enough room for a couple hundred million folks to move back in?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
The British came up with the idea, the US built the armor. For example, the British designers of the armor didn't think of using Depleted Uranium in it. Besides the M-1s success isn't just from the armor, but the combination of armor, speed, firepower, sensors and maneuverability.
The T-34 tank used an American designed suspension, and the StG-44 and AK-47 both used a magazine designed by Remington in the US, does the US get credit for those systems then?
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)
All of which will have to be relocated due to earthquakes and flooding. Brilliant.
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?
Look at this on the bright side. Most of the climate change deniers are right wingers. America's heartland is overwhelmingly right wing. There goes your grass roots support for that ideology. Either that or they can continue to say that there's no effect as the water reaches their bottom lip.
Or maybe you've all been praying to the wrong God and this is the wrath of the FSM.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
Amen. You just reminded me of the time I got a defective monitor, a defective RMA, and then finally a 3rd monitor RMA that worked. The 3rd one was made in USA. The others were made someplace else. I was thinking, "so this is what they do when they really want to make sure he's not an unhappy customer--dip into the limited supply of American-made monitors".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
Uppity niggers, huh? How 'bout just plain freaking STUPID? Doesn't matter if you're black, white, brown, or whatever, stupid is stupid.
Ask your family what part (if any) they took in blocking the Army Corps of Engineers from rebuilding and upgrading the levees in the city, and around the lake. Uppity niggers? I suggest you call out the Sierra Club, among others, and get thier position on those uppity niggers. It will be something like, "We must preserve the wonderful fishing north of the City, even if it means those uppity niggers drown during the next hurricane!"
The uppity folk in New Orleans, whatever colors they might be, should have been insisting that the Corps proceed with improvements and upgrades all through the last 50 years, instead of caving in to idiot concerns about the "environment".
After you've digested all of that - you might investigate those two spots where the levees ultimately failed. Both of them had panels removed by the department of water and sewers, fittings installed on those panels, then the panels were replaced in the vary same places WITHOUT ANY WORK TO STABILIZE THE SOIL. Both panels failed when that destabilized earth washed out from under them.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The federal flood insurance pools ensure that people continue to build in extremely high-risk flood zones. No private insurer would provide insurance against flood in these areas (rightfully so, as the odds of writing the business profitably are incredibly small and subject to massive volatility), and therefore lenders would not provide financing, as the lenders would be unable to be protected from default in the event of a flood (ie once a person's home is destroyed by an uninsured flood, that person retains no motivation to continue paying the mortgage on a destroyed house).
The National Flood Insurance Program is another example of well intentioned government subsidies putting people directly in harm's way.
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'...
Wow, and I always thought I knew how stupid stupid could get, then you come along and prove me wrong. I needed that.
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.
Indeed. If they can't go elsewhere then that money should be spent on building homes that are adapted to the local geography, instead of generic homes adapted to nowhere.
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.
Thank 'the Heartland'.
I thank 'the Heartland' for their ability and willingness to take advantage of an environment that is suitable for growing vast quantities of food. Does that mean I need to respect their backward and counterproductive political views? Not for a second. I grew up there. I know how stupid most of those people are.
That is all.
I believe CptNerd was being sarcastic. My reasoning is because his comment alludes to a story I heard a number of years ago from a member of a pro-ranching PAC. This particular story, as it was relayed to me, goes something like the following:
At a convention or regulatory meeting of sorts, possibly for ranchers, a young environmentalist was espousing the cruelty of keeping animals in such confines. Slaughtering them was a form of murder, after all, and our passionate young friend proposed that all cattle in captivity should be freed so they can live again in the wild as nature intended. Puzzled by the economics of such actions, a rancher asked the young man, "If you free all the cattle, how do you plan on buying meat?"
Without hesitation, the environmentalist replied "At the grocery store like everyone else."
He who has no
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.
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
Fuck I'm hungry now. I think I'll have a donnerburger. Damn, the flood washed out my BBQ pit. I would have fixed it but it was snowed in last winter.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Wake up! China's birth control laws are "voluntary" in name only. The fact is that if a woman is discovered to be pregnant (in any term) after having registered a birth, she will be "counseled" (i.e. kidnapped & tortured) until she "decides" to have an abortion. If she decides otherwise, she'll be committed to a mental institution where she will have an abortion anyway.
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.
As a point of order, what you say may or may not have been true before. However, whether it was or not it isn't true now. Now it is more a matter of "get an abortion" or "pay a heavy fine".
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
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."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantam_GP, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willys_M38, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M151_MUTT - not the Jeep brand.
If you live in a flood plain, you can expect to get flooded... period. If you live near a major earthquake fault, as I do, you can expect the big one.. period. Plan on it. Unfortunately, most people don't. Plan that is. Mother Nature always bats last.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I don't think so. The flooding could have been moderated somewhat but there's enough water in the system that there would have been flooding no matter what the Army Corps of Engineers did.
Don't forget, Chrysler was bought by Daimler, a German company, several years ago.
Your argument, where is it now?
This story sounds like a red herring.
What surprized me is that the levees are such exceptionally feeble things.
Herring is a salt water fish.
If one sets a panel on a bad foundation, then when the ground gets wet, it falls over.
Afterwards go back with the legacy design to save on vellum.
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.
While I think that re-building below sea-level is short-sighted, your characterizations are inaccurate.
Those who originally lived in New Orleans (which was 200+ years ago) lived on the high ground of the natural levee formed by the banks of the Mississippi (The shape of that is how New Orleans got the nickname "the Crescent City") It was not a nice, smooth flat place in the floodplain.
After some time, the idea that the swamps would be fertile farmland if they could be drained was realized by a French engineer that invented the big pumps. Of course, the tenant farmers then lived in the lowlands that were previously swamps, and were periodically flooded out. Over time, that population increased, and eventually grew into a city.
An unfortunate side effect of draining the swamps was that the land actually shrunk and settled as the water was pulled out, gradually dropping the elevation of the land.
To protect from flooding, levees were built along the river to contain the spring overflow. This had an additional unintended consequence, since the floods no longer spread out to deposit their silt and sediment and build up the land, and the flood plain gradually dropped further.
So the pumping of the swamps allowed use of the land, and the existence of the levees protected against "normal" floods, but those things created a sense of comfort while setting up New Orleans up for a big disaster.
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.
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.
After some time, the idea that the swamps would be fertile farmland if they could be drained was realized by a French engineer that invented the big pumps.
Actually it was more the Dutch than the French who came up with the technology and the know-how for converting swampland. Blame the French for crimes like Edith Piaf, but the Dutch are mostly at fault for inappropriately-drained swampland.
Indeed I was. The story is likely apocryphal, but I've witnessed variations on the underlying mindset. I didn't have to exaggerate very much to obtain absurdity.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
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.
Hey, they wanted cheap, they got cheap. We offered them our dike product as well, but they weren't interested.
I was seeing regular ads [...]
You're doing it wrong.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
You know, once upon a time we had a nation full of free-running meat. Our government actually paid people to put a stop to that so that ranchers could put up fences and mistreat meat for profit. Tens of thousands of people were supported by this free-running meat, and we slaughtered them too. The US 1st Cavalry came out to the county I live in and murdered every man, woman, and child on a then-settled local island by way of "revenge" for killing a local murder and slaver whose wife assisted with his killing by wetting the powder. She was probably tired of her husband raping the natives. Interestingly this is the story of the first (recorded) white woman in California.
Today I often drive past the Kelsey monument while going to get a burrito. The meat in the burrito is produced by a corporate concern. It's probably crap hormone meat.
The best solution? Be less wasteful. How many pounds of meat are thrown away every day in this country? I bet it's a substantial percentage of what is actually eaten.
Personally, I'd like to see the fences torn down, native grasses replanted, and the herds restored. But I'm in favor of the right to roam and against private property ownership, so I'm used to ideas not getting any traction. I don't actually propose we do these things because I know it's a waste of time to do so. I make more modest proposals. Speaking of which...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
Given the number of victim's its rolled in over the year's, I thinks it's utilizationism of subtlety is optimised. Your welcome to craft your own original grammar troll of course.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's not that the French came up with the basic ideas of how to drain lowlands, but that the particular pumping system used in New Orleans was designed by a French engineer, which turned the idea of farming the New Orleans lowlands into a reality. (Not surprising, considering the French history of the area)
Not at all. I do find it hilarious that you snagged someone hook, line, and sinker.
Then again, this is Slashdot. Most people never get the jokes...
He who has no