It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that's seven feet under sea level, House Speaker Dennis Hastert said of federal assistance for hurricane-devastated New Orleans.
"It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," the Illinois Republican said in an interview Wednesday with the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Illinois.
Source
Speaker Hastert has a short memory. As many in his state might want to remind him, the Federal Government hasn't exactly shied away from bailing out flooded, vulnerable towns on the Mississippi before. Let's hit the Wayback Machine, shall we?
So it took me a couple days to think of this comparison, but the relevant history occured when I was 11 and it therefore took me a while to retrieve it from its hiding place between the fall of the Soviet Union and a Very Special Episode of ALF.
Here's a description of the Great Flood of 1993 I found on a NOAA website:
From May through September of 1993, major and/or record flooding occurred across North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Fifty flood deaths occurred, and damages approached $15 billion. Hundreds of levees failed along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.
The magnitude and severity of this flood event was simply over-whelming, and it ranks as one of the greatest natural disasters ever to hit the United States. Approximately 600 river forecast points in the Midwestern United States were above flood stage at the same time. Nearly 150 major rivers and tributaries were affected. It was certainly the largest and most significant flood event ever to occur in the United States (Fig. 1).
Tens of thousands of people were evacuated, some never to return to their homes. At least 10,000 homes were totally destroyed, hundreds of towns were impacted with at least 75 towns totally and completely under flood waters. At least 15 million acres of farmland were inundated, some of which may not be useable for years to come.
Transportation was severely impacted. Barge traffic on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers was stopped for nearly 2 months. Bridges were out or not accessible on the Mississippi River from Davenport, Iowa, downstream to St. Louis, Missouri. On the Missouri River, bridges were out from Kansas City, downstream to St. Charles, Missouri. Numerous interstate highways and other roads were closed. Ten commercial airports were flooded. All railroad traffic in the Midwest was halted. Numerous sewage treatment and water treatment plants were destroyed (Larson, 1993).
Most of the land destroyed by this flood was, in fact, vulnerable to flooding. Levees held back the river, just as they did with Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. Consider this:
This is not New Orleans. This is Grafton, IL.
This is not New Orleans. This is Jefferson City, MO.
This is not New Orleans. This is Alton, IL.
As Wikipedia states, even the well-maintained, 52-foot floodwall of St. Louis was barely able to keep the waters of the Mississippi River out (one shudders to think what would have happened to that city if Bush and Brown had been in charge back then). There are a lot of other pictures of that catastrophic event on the internet if you'd care to find them. The point is that catastrophic, levee-busting flooding is by no means restricted to our "seven mile below" city. Yet the response of our Congressional leaders was completely different then. When it was the farmland and small towns being wiped out across the Midwest, our leaders sang a different tune.
The fact is that we've built our cities and towns where they are for a reason. Ecologically volatile areas-- particularly floodplains-- are some of the most productive and commercially important areas in America. They've historically been wayposts on one of the country's most important commercial routes, and the economy of virtually every small town in the Mississippi valley depends either wholly or in part on control of the river. The 1993 floods garnered an immediate response in the form of an effective FEMA operation, federal government aid to repair damaged levees and communities, and an attempt to better understand and manage the hydrologic system of the Mississippi and its tributaries. In other words, the country chose to help the affected people and then take a long term view to try and make sure this type of tragedy never happened again.
The Speaker of the House did not go out of his way in the MIDDLE of the disaster to excoriate the people facing rising floodwaters for being so "stupid" as to live in a floodplain. I wonder if the people in those affected states remember the terror of dealing with a rising, raging river. I wonder if they remember the federal response they got. If wonder if they're considering how good a response they'd get if it happened today.
Look at that list: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Illinois. That's one strong Democratic state, two "lean-Dems", one genuine swing, one "lean-Rep", and four Republican states. And the areas affected were almost all definitively Republican areas. I wonder how they react when they hear that, in this Administration, the government is more concerned with lecturing them about making their living in the Mississippi Valley than helping them when things go wrong. Republicans like Hastert have already written off New Orleans b/c it's historically important location was "dumb". I wonder what the residents of other "dumb" towns that owe their survival to fast, effective government response a decade ago are feeling right now.
Edited to reflect factual correction noted in comments