Paul VandeVelder has a pretty chilling op-ed piece in the May 25 LA Times that went national today. He argues that the massive flooding along the Mississippi isn't a natural disaster, but a man-made one. Specifically, VandeVelder pins the flooding at least in part on the Pick-Sloan Plan, the massive 1944 project to dam up the upper Missouri River.
This is a man-made disaster, the legacy of an earlier generation of politicians, farmers and ranchers who made a lot of bad (and very expensive) decisions to correct short-term problems on the Missouri River when the best available science — including findings in a 1934 corps report — warned Congress that those solutions would create dire long-term consequences.
That report, by Chief Engineer Lytle Brown, concluded that building dams along the upper Missouri would make it nearly impossible to control flooding along the Mississippi in years of heavy runoff. Brown argued, as have many river hydrologists from the 1960s onward, that the dams would merely send the water behind them down the path of least resistance--into an already swollen Mississippi.
The Brown report seemingly killed off dreams of big water projects, but heavy flooding along the Missouri in 1943 resulted in science being trumped by politics. The result was what was at the time the biggest public works project in American history. Now, 67 years later, it looks like the chickens have come home to roost.
VandeVelder concedes that building those dams has created a perfect storm of sorts for the lower Mississippi delta, including New Orleans.
Had we not built dams on the Missouri, had we refrained from building homes and cities on Missouri River floodplains, periodic floods would have occurred, but without the catastrophic consequences we see today. Floods would have replenished the river bottoms with alluvial silts (producing bumper crops) and deposited nutrients on the barrier islands in the gulf. Those islands, which once protected New Orleans from violent gulf storms, have vanished in the 50 years since the dams were built. This double-whammy — New Orleans vulnerable to storms from the gulf side, and the lower Mississippi and its delta vulnerable to flooding from the upstream side — can be laid at the feet of Pick-Sloan.
Brown had another reason to argue building dams in the upper Missouri was scientifically unsound. The Missouri carries a lot of silt, and rather than allowing that silt to flow to the bottom of the Mississippi, the dams caused it to build up along the Missouri. The result? At least one dam built from Pick-Sloan may be rendered useless due to the silt buildup.
If VandeVelder is right, we may be seeing yet another example of what happens when politics gets in the way of science.