Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
What follows below is a slightly edited version of my comment this morning at Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism website, upon a story from Grist about what can or cannot be done about the now infamous, repeated flooding events in Ellicott City, Maryland. Here is the story I commented upon: www.nakedcapitalism.com/...
When I saw photos of this year’s flooding, just a few weeks ago, I thought at first I was looking at images from a small village in the Alps, where a mountain lake, dam or glacial impoundment had given way, and sent the torrent rushing at great force and velocity down the mountainside. We’ve all seen images like that before, but in eastern Maryland, which doesn’t have those types of slopes?? Unimaginable.
I was tempted to write then, but held off, needing to ground the two torrential rains of the past two years in the history of the region. So brace yourself, this is not a conventional answer. From my own environmental history, I got educated in stormwater engineering by Diane Cameron, formerly of NRDC, and the Delaware Riverkeeper’s favorite engineering firm, Cahill Associates, whose principle, Tom Cahill, seemed deeply versed in all the softer, biologically friendly ways to handle stormwater other than the often aesthetically horrible detention basins, grassy or even worse, concrete. The key ideas from Tom and a broader reform movement, was to keep the stormwater on site, not ship it off, and make sure it infiltrated back into the soil, and eventually, into the aquifer if there was one.
But solutions and retrofitting especially, don’t come cheap. And Maryland politics still reverberates with the populist revolt against our now defunct “stormwater tax,” — where small businesses and property owners rallied to the emotional charge that the hated green regulators had imposed a “rain tax” on the righteous, hard-working and anti-red tape “producers.”
You can’t separate those impulses from the election of Larry Hogan in 2014, and the demise of reform efforts to get an effective Forest Conservation Act out of our old (going back to 1971 or so) genuinely ineffective “regulatory dance” that makes money for consultants but doesn’t protect existing forests or plant the much needed new ones — replacement ratio-ed ones in the bill’s contorted logic.
More than any conservation bill I’ve worked on, this nightmare of red tape and ineffectiveness illustrates the passionate life’s work of the late Theordore Lowi of Cornel, famous for his book “The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States.” Lowi’s theme was that liberalism’s regulatory reach and rush to reform had led to massive legislative delegation to regulatory bodies, who would then fill in the science and details of vague but noble, inspiring bills. Lowi had more than a touch of Libertarianism in his work, but he was sincere and had a valid point: regulations built out of poorly drafted “delegating” legislature would eventually serve as a rallying cry for a grand revolt of the business community and the Republican Right...and on this, Lowi surely got it right. At the same time, without some of the work of EPA that he would accuse of very bad “form,” we would have no human health and “nature” protections….at all.
Maryland has chosen a different path than NJ, which has passed tougher, clearer laws, like its freshwater wetland act, Pinelands and Highlands legislation to protect forests and watersheds (the two are inseparable)...but the harsh truth is that laws drafted and passed much more to Lowi’s noble high ideal notions of legislative standards — didn’t prevent the great backlash against the regulatory state that Chris Christie angrily represented. Our heroic entrepreneurs don’t want the chains of regulations restraining them, so that “Atlas” can shrug and shake off the reforms of the little people claiming the mantle of defenders of “the public interest.”
Now here is what I posted at Naked Capitalism this morning on the Ellicott City horror stories:
Ok folks. I live in Western Maryland, am a Sierra Club member, and I’m the former Director of Conservation for NJ Audubon Society, from the NJ famous for flooding in the Passaic River valley, and most infamously in Wayne, NJ. NJ had lost almost half its wetlands before it passed the nation’s toughest freshwater wetlands protection act in the late 1980’s. The Army Corps of Engineers and the USGS (United States Geologic Service) had some great charts linking the degree of wetland loss and impervious surface cover in a given watershed to flooding potential. My point in saying this is in the Ellicott City situation is that there we are all coming very late to the game, in a situation, a physical setting, where even the Wikipedia write-up of the city and its history tells us this in the section on flooding:
“The town is prone to flooding from the Patapsco River and its tributary the Tiber River. These floods have had a major impact on the history of the town, often destroying important businesses and killing many. Ellicott City has had major devastating floods in 1817, 1837, 1868,[58] 1901, 1917, 1923, 1938, 1942, 1952, 1956, 1972 (Hurricane Agnes), 1975 (Hurricane Eloise), 1989, 2011, 2016, and 2018. The 1868 flood washed away 14 houses, killing 39 to 43 (accounts vary) in and around Ellicott City. It wiped out the Granite Manufacturing Cotton Mill, Charles A. Gambrill’s Patapsco Mill, John Lee Carroll’s mill buildings, and dozens of homes.[58] One mill was rebuilt by Charles Gambrill, which remained in operation until a fire in 1916.[10]:36”
In another section, not mentioned here, the early industrial structures were swept away – a grain mill I believe, were wiped out in the mid-18th century.
So the much later intensification of impervious surface cover only made an already untenable geographic-hydro-logic situation worse.
There is no inexpensive solution, because retrofitting is very difficult to do. The protocols of modern stormwater magagement for building sites call for pervious pavement (which allows infiltration of rainfall) of all types, keeping stormwater onsite and letting it infiltrate back deep into the soil. So the ugly “detention basin” era has been out for some time in favor of rain gardens and shallow wetland impoundments – good for wildlife enhancement as well.
But we live in an age in Maryland where Governor Larry Hogan was elected in a surprise victory in 2014 on an anti-regulatory platform, and the state’s very powerful building and real estate interests rallied small business types and Libertarians to denounce the state’s stormwater tax aimed at keeping pollution out of the Chesapeake Bay. Taxing the rain! — a “Rain Tax” was the rallying cry.
And I just witnessed these same powerful business forces block even mild reforms in Maryland’s, faux regulatory Forest Conservation Act, which is not regulatory at all. Is it potentially very relevant for reducing future flooding, water pollution and pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, for fighting global warming – and for future employment for a CCC/WPA ecological restoration effort? You bet it is. These powerful real estate and building interests would have none of that, though, complaining that Maryland already has a thicket of regulations – true enough compared to the awful environmental faking that Virginia and Pennsylvania and West Virginia play pretend with – but very effective rhetorically to threaten any potentially tougher reform efforts in Maryland.
I’ve joked – in part – that the best thing would be for Ellicott City residents to “Go West” to Cumberland and Frostburg in Mountain Maryland and help fill in all the vacant storefronts and abandoned houses in our area. Not likely: if we can’t get a CCC today – one of the most popular of the New Deal programs, we’re not likely to get one of its modernized “relocation-resettlement” programs, which were not popular, despite their human and ecological “good intentions.”
So that’s where we are, from the eyes of a Maryland resident in the middle of the arguments.