Uneasy Rhetoric

A few days ago, a friend of mine in St. Louis sent me a link to this story from Reuters. The key part:

A perfect example of what can go wrong was the 1993 Mississippi Flood, considered the most devastating single flood in U.S. history.

Heavy rainfall overwhelmed the Mississippi and its tributaries, flooding 17,000 square miles of land in nine states, killing 50 people and causing $15 billion in damage, according to Norbert Schwartz of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency’s mitigation program.

The St. Louis area was badly hit but Adolphus Busch, chairman of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance, said that more than 14,000 acres of floodplain land in the region has been developed since then.

“By 1997-1998 we started to see huge, wholesale developments again going on out there,” Busch said.

But perhaps a worse risk exists in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, said Jeffrey Mount of the University of California, Davis.

He predicts a 2-in-3 probability of a catastrophic levee failure over the next 50 years in the 700,000-acre (280,000-hectare) estuary that makes up the delta.

“In California we know we have two kinds of levees — those that have failed and those that will fail,” Mount said.

He said the ground was subsiding and sea levels rising, compounded by “the wild card in California, seismicity, which can undo this system in a heartbeat.”

“So you have a policy vacuum, and what rushes into a policy vacuum in California because of land prices? Urbanization. We are reinventing Katrina all over again.”

Here’s the problem: what are we going to do with all of the people who are moving here? Unfortunately, “urbanization” is going to happen unless this becomes a less desirable place to live. So how do we protect everyone from flooding? What can we do to ensure the levees won’t fail? Or do we all just buy lots of insurance and hope for the best?