This is a message I got from Shelly Sheehy - a leader in the Sierra Club
in the Quad Cities area. The Club is not mentioned but our message is.
The people she is congratulating are Sheila Bosworth, a volunter who
lives a block from the river and Brett Hulsey - staff in the Madison WI
office.
From:
[log in to unmask]
Congrats to Sheila and Brett for their efforts when FEMA was here this
week.
sls
Subject:
NYTimes.com Article: New Flood, Old Truths
Date:
Sat, 28 Apr 2001 09:42:23 -0400 (EDT)
This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by [log in to unmask]
I wish the QC Times would print this.
/-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\
Let NYTimes.com Come to You
Sign up for one of our weekly e-mails
and the news will come directly to you.
YOUR MONEY brings you a wealth of analysis
and information about personal investing.
CIRCUITS plugs you into the latest on
personal technology. TRAVEL DISPATCH offers
you a jump on special travel deals and news.
http://email.nytimes.com/email/email.jsp?eta5
\----------------------------------------------------------/
New Flood, Old Truths
ne hopes that each new natural disaster, be it an earthquake or a
giant mudslide or destructive flood, will leave people better
prepared for the next one — or at least teach them not to repeat
the same mistakes. Yet the latest Mississippi flood suggests,
again, that when the waters recede, so does human memory.
The famous Wilkes-Barre flood of 1972 and the Mississippi River
flood of 1993 led to fierce criticism of the Army Corps of
Engineers, whose traditional methods of flood control were found to
have made matters much worse than they might have been. But the
Corps has never abandoned its blind faith in dams and levees that,
when overused, constrict the river's natural flow, invite
overbuilding and end up doing more harm than good.
Similarly, after the North Carolina flood in 1999, Congress was
urged to amend the federal flood insurance program so that people
would no longer get cheap insurance to rebuild homes in the flood
plain. Congress made some changes, but not that one, and people
keep rebuilding in the same places. Finally, after each of these
floods, local communities were urged not to allow new development
in the flood plain. But they kept doing it, hoping that the
ever-higher levees that Congress was urging the Corps to build
would protect them from their folly.
All the old debates have resurfaced with this year's Mississippi
flood. Great progress has been made in one area. Since 1993,
federal and state governments have spent hundreds of millions of
dollars to buy and demolish about 13,000 homes along the
Mississippi and its tributaries — converting the property to open
space and allowing the owners to relocate elsewhere. That was an
important concession to the idea that battling the waters is a
losing proposition, and that the smart thing to do is not to
constrict the river, but rather to let it flow naturally into the
flood plain.
But making concessions to nature is not something that comes
easily to politicians and developers. As Douglas Jehl pointed out
in yesterday's Times, the Bush administration has said that it
intends to reduce the federal share of funding for the property
acquisition program from the current 75 percent to 50 percent. In
addition, the White House is trying to kill entirely a valuable
$160 million program that helps farmers convert cropland to
wetlands, which act as natural sponges during floods. Meantime, the
Corps of Engineers, none the wiser for previous floods, is
barreling ahead with various levee-building projects, including a
$58 million project just west of St. Louis that is designed to
protect a strip mall in the flood plain of the lower Missouri
River.
At times like these, one looks for wisdom to the head of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, the government unit that is
most centrally involved in natural disasters. President Clinton's
FEMA chief, James Witt, promoted the acquisition program. His
successor, a Bush campaign operative named Joe Allbaugh, is still
learning. Mr. Allbaugh was right when he said that Congress must
stop subsidizing people who insist on rebuilding in the flood
plain. But he missed the mark when he criticized the river city of
Davenport, Iowa, for its failure to build a flood wall that might
have offered greater protection from high waters.
For one thing, his criticism indicated a bias toward the very
structural approaches to flood protection that have helped
exacerbate the problem in past floods. For another, it ignored the
fact that Davenport's approach to the river has been more sensible
than most. The city has no levees. Its residents have deliberately
chosen to remain connected to the river, building shoreline parks
and leaving open spaces where other cities might have built levees
and offices. The result is that damage is minimal compared with
places with dense concentrations of buildings that are overwhelmed
when floods breach the protective levees, as happened up and down
the river in 1993.
As Davenport's mayor, Phil Yerington, aptly observed: "We're never
going to beat the river. Nobody ever beats the river." It is a
lesson that the federal government and the commercial builders have
yet to learn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/opinion/28SAT1.html?ex=989465343&ei=1&en=839f6fb0e6b161f9
/-----------------------------------------------------------------\
Visit NYTimes.com for complete access to the
most authoritative news coverage on the Web,
updated throughout the day.
Become a member today! It's free!
http://www.nytimes.com?eta
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
To get off the IOWA-TOPICS list, send any message to:
[log in to unmask]
|
