Last weekend, the region around St. Louis experienced heavy rains, which led to swelling of the Mississippi and Meramec Rivers, and general flood-related complications, Local media have had loads of stories on this situation, of course (example
here; you can look for more at the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website, among others). One
P-D story that caught my eye was more of a big-picture story,
this article from this past Monday by Bryce Gray about several towns upstream along the Mississippi that have apparently built their levees higher than the levels which the Army Corps of Engineers had recommended:
"About 40 percent of levees along the Mississippi River in the Army Corps of Engineers district north of St. Louis are built higher than their authorized heights, according to the agency’s own findings.
The Corps’ Rock Island District, which covers an area beginning about 60 miles upstream from St. Louis, reports that about 80 out of 202 miles of levee systems it surveyed are improperly high, based on data yet to be publicly released."
According to Scott Whitney, the flood risk manager and head of project management for the Corps’ Rock Island District:
“Some of those were between 2 and 4 feet above their authorized elevation,. The revelation is out there that levee districts throughout this region have taken, in some cases, some pretty extreme measures to protect themselves.”
This has a (pardon the pun) downstream effect, pretty easy to guess: namely, diversion of the high flood waters literally downstream, to towns and cities further along the river in question. Of course, this raises the issue of other towns and cities doing the same thing with their levees. Gray noted:
"But the chronically overbuilt levees to the north cause some to wonder whether the problem is more widespread, rekindling some skepticism about levee heights around St. Louis. Last year, the issue gained visibility when an independent group found the levee in Valley Park, along the recently flooded Meramec River, to be as much as 8 feet higher than what was believed to be its proper height."
In fact, Gray addressed this same issue in
this September 2016 P-D article on that particular Valley Park levee that was 8 feet higher than it should have been, quoting Glenn Jamboretz of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance:
"This extra height, while providing significant protection for Valley Park, has notably contributed to the volume and velocity of floodwaters in the communities of Eureka, Fenton, Kirkwood and Arnold."
One local academic who has spoken out on this issue is Washington University professor
Robert ('Bob') Criss, of the Earth and Planetary Sciences department. In the September 2016 article, Gray quotes Professor Criss:
"I think the system is overbuilt everywhere. You might protect one area, (but) you dump water on someone else. I don’t understand why we keep doing it.”
The good prof is perhaps being just a tad disingenuous (or disquietingly naïve, or too absorbed in his real-fact based world) in that last remark. From a viewpoint of self-interest, it is actually completely rational to build levees too high. You want to be safe if the flood waters rise higher than expected, so to be safe, you build in extra protection with extra height. So in terms of your own local community, it's totally sensible to add extra height on to your levee.
The catch, and the problem, of course, comes when multiple entities do that, when they act "selfishly" in terms of protecting themselves individually, but at the expense of the larger community. It's a clear example of the tragedy of the commons. Criss actually does seem to realize this, as quoted in the 2016 article:
"When levees are built, Criss said that it is essential to ensure that they are built according to a coordinated plan, in order to avoid an arms-race scenario to see which municipality can afford better flood protection.
“(Otherwise) it becomes a war of the levees — who has the highest levee and then you dump water on the other guy,”
9 months later, Criss is still trying to tell the truth about flooding, but apparently no one is listening, with this bit of inconvenient truth:
“With our so-called flood prevention efforts, high levees are counterproductive, just magnifying the potential damage. The water’s gotta spread out.”
Exactly, on that last point. But no one, again completely rationally on a local level, wants to be the one to get any that spread-out of water. So the extra-high levees are a massive way of kicking the can down the road, so to speak. But eventually, someone has to get hit, a town without the wherewithal to build a too-high levee, for example. Back in 2016, Criss noted, again perhaps a bit disingenuously given the current political climate (or maybe American human nature in general):
"When levees are built, Criss said that it is essential to ensure that they are built according to a coordinated plan, in order to avoid an arms-race scenario to see which municipality can afford better flood protection."
A "coordinated plan"? between communities, spreading the pain fairly and equally? Oh, we can't have that, not in the era of Drumpf (enabled by B-o'bers): that's SOCIALISM, and that's evil, isn't it? The common good? How ridiculous in 2017! (At least among a certain crowd.)
For the moment, the weather has calmed down since the big rains this past week. But it's not clear that the wider MO region will heed Professor Criss' calls, since they haven't until now.
Pretty bad at the start of a week which culminated in the first step to the repeal of the ACA, huh? With that, time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week......