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Midwesterners have to be wondering: Will April be the cruelest month? Patterns in the Midwest this spring are eerily reminiscent of 1993 and 1994, back-to-back years of serious flooding. The great flood of 1993 caused nearly $20 billion of economic damage, damaging or destroying more than 50,000 homes and killing at least 38 people.
Parallels this year include abnormally high levels of precipitation in late winter and early spring, and early flooding in various regions. In March, Missouri, Arkansas and Illinois and the Ohio River experienced flooding. A still-unknown factor is the effect of the snow melt from upstream states on river systems this spring and summer. Wisconsin, for example, had record amounts of snow this winter.
Despite the similarity in conditions and periods of flooding nearly every year after those flood years more than a decade ago, one thing Midwesterners have not learned is “geologic reality,” says Robert E. Criss, Ph.D..
“When people build commercial or residential real estate in flood plains, when they build on sink holes, when they build on fault lines, when they build on the hillsides in L.A. that are going to burn and burn, over and over again, they’re ignoring geologic reality,” Criss says. “They’re asking for chronic problems…”“Building a levee for a community simply ‘certifies’ that this is a great place to build more things,” Criss says. “The Corps of Engineers will come in and claim it’s a 500-year levee, which is a claim they cannot make, yet routinely do. That just encourages more infrastructure to move into these areas…”
Criss says the claim that a levee will withstand floods for 500 years is “an absurd exaggeration. If some private company were making claims that they’ll sell you a car that will run for 500 years, they’d be in jail. Somehow, the government feels justified making absurd claims that have no basis.”
Are we to believe our political leaders would intentionally make absurd claims? How subversive and non-conformist.
