As part of an exchange that has been going on in an email thread I've been having with some friends, the subject of the mid-west flooding came up and I related the story below and the comment about why the people along the Mississippi are in so much trouble (note that this is 100% my own original material, so no 'copyright' problems here). Anyway, one of the guys suggested that this was something that really should be posted somewhere where the public could read it as the consensus of our group was that this was something that most people were probably not aware of nor was the media reporting on this aspect of the history of how we've found ourselves in the situation which we have:
When I was in Army ROTC back in college (the late 60's) we took a field trip to visit the Corp of Engineers operation in Minneapolis/St. Paul. While we were there they explained how the preferred method of flood control on a long and expansive a river system like the Mississippi and it's various tributaries, was to build flood-control dams upstream (we even visited one of these on a side-trip, where a smaller river flowed into the St. Croix River in Wisconsin, one of the larger tributaries which joined the Mississippi just south of the Twin Cites) as close to the various sources as possible to capture and then later release controlled amounts of the spring run-off. And during those periods when the spring rains were severe, just allow the river to overflow onto the traditional flood plains along the middle and lower portions of the Mississippi, which had the extra benefit of replenishing the soil on a regular basis. And if a farmer lost a crop every 10 or 15 years, you just paid for his losses for that year and moved on. In the end this was the most efficient and cost-effective approach to take.
The problem was that it was politically 'unacceptable' since most all of the money would be spent out-of-sight in places like Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, etc, that is up-river, and very little downstream in places like Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Louisiana, etc. Well Senators and Representatives wanted to be able to show their constituents how they had 'brought home the bacon' as it were and that could most easily be done by building levees in their various districts. The problem is that levees ONLY makes the river higher and if a levee does fail or there's a part of the river where there are no levees or they're inadequate, the resulting flooding would be even worse since the river has been made artificially higher. Besides, many of the 'farmers' along the river were looking to sell/develop their land for housing tracts and commercial zones and therefore they couldn't have these 'natural flood plains' underwater every 10 or 15 years. They needed the levees to keep their land dry thus increasing the value of their property. So the Corp of Engineers, based on how the money was being allocated (i.e. 'earmarked'), was forced to concentrate on building levees which left only limited resources for the really effective flood-control projects back on the tributaries running into the Mississippi, which is the real source of that 'river surge' they've been talking about on the news this week. And if there had been adequate flood-control dams up-river, there would be more that the Corp of Engineers could be doing now to control this 'surge' and if the flood plains had been left as farmland or if the levees were not in place, much of the excess water would have just found its natural level and the cities downstream would NOT be in the panic that they are now.
OCU
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