Emergency Management - Fall 2008 - (Page 24)

In 2001, Bob Criss, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote that the 1993 flood was, in reality, a 30- or 50-year flood. “They said I was Chicken Little,” Criss said. But he feels vindicated by recent events. “We’re seeing more floods and worse ones,” he said. There’s been progress at mitigating these risks in areas like Tulsa, Okla., and the Pacific Northwest, where progressive strategies have controlled flooding. But overall it’s been slow, with a continuation of the same philosophies. “We, as emergency managers, have to start saying, ‘Look, we have to take a much broader view, otherwise as our climate changes, this is going to be a big deal,’” said Bob Freitag, a former emergency manager with FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] and currently professor of urban design and planning at the University of Washington. “We, as emergency managers, see everything that goes wrong: all the mistakes that were made on that stream — upstream in terms of fencing it in, removing all storage, removing the forest that provides detention. All those failures — we see [them] at a point when it comes downstream and destroys homes.” Warming Trend According to the National Climatic Data Center, the Earth’s summer temperature rose above average for the 30th straight year in 2008. Some areas of the country are experiencing more rainfall instead of snow, which means more severe flooding in the spring. “The Governmental Panel on Climate Change has said that in many cases, we’re going to see less water in an area because of climate change, but when it comes it’s going to be the gullywasher,” said Gerry Galloway, a civil engineer and former brigadier general who was assigned by the White House to lead a committee assessing the Great Flood of 1993. In response, most areas are trying to funnel more water through narrower channels, the ageold strategy. In the Midwest, the Army Corps of Engineers is deepening channels with wing dikes and other structures to allow more water to pass through. “That’s what they think they’re going to do,” Criss said. “You might be able to do that locally with continued maintenance and dredging, but thinking they’re going to change the bottom of the river for any significant difference is folly.” The idea of creating narrower, deeper channels has been the Midwest’s flood-control philosophy for more than 100 years, but 19th-century maps show the Mississippi River is no deeper now than it was then, Criss said. “How do you dig a hole in the bottom of a river? You don’t, and thinking that we can is not very bright.” Any dredging done on the bottom of a river, in this case the Mississippi, is pointless because Indiana residents boat down a street that ﬂooded as a result of remnants of Hurricane Ike in September 2008. 24 PHOTO BY LEO SKINNER/FEMA it will just fill back up with mud without continuous dredging, Criss said. That leaves the water nowhere to go but up. Criss said more than 100 years of tinkering with nature’s flow is creating unpredictable systems. “We not only have more floods and higher flood stages, but they occur at every time of the year now,” he said. “Basically we have a more chaotic river than we had historically. It’s not the controlled system we think we’re trying to make. We delude ourselves with these concepts.” Levees have been the main form of flood protection for much of the country, but a recent report suggested that the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees many of the levee systems, lacks an inventory of thousands of levees that may be unsafe. That report came amid heightened concerns after the record floods in spring 2008 and more extreme weather forecast because of climate change. For the most part, the levees have held up, but there were breaches this spring in Missouri and elsewhere. And everyone knows of Hurricane Katrina, where 60 percent of damage resulted from a failed floodwall. “When you’re dealing with a levee, you’re dealing with a pile of dirt,” Galloway said. “In some cases, it literally started with a ‘wind row’ from a farmer’s grader, then somebody else added something to it and you have no idea what’s in it. Some levees have a history of 150 to 200 years and it’s hard to tell what’s down at the base.” Behind those levees, communities developed and are still developing despite the hazards. Galloway led a blue ribbon study in 1994 that concluded with the Galloway Report on the 1993 floods. “That same report could be put out today on the Midwest floods that we just had, and it started with, ‘Don’t let people build in the floodplain when they don’t need to,’” Galloway said. Yet development in dangerous areas continues nationwide. Galloway pointed to parts of St. Louis near the St. Louis River where development continues despite the flood threat. “Why? It’s close to downtown. There is lots of land in Missouri on higher ground, but it’s cheaper to develop; it’s closer in and people can say, ‘Oh, I’m by the river,’ so they let them do it.” These communities spring up behind aging levees that offer protection from a 100-year flood. “One hundred years means a one-in-four

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Emergency Management - Fall 2008

Emergency Management - Fall 2008 Contents Contributors Editor’s Letter In the Field Deep Freeze EM Bulletin Major Player In the News Uncharted Waters Bio-Sensing Bluegills Joint Accounts Education Directory Degress of Change Triage in 3-D Products Eric's Corner Last Word

Emergency Management - Fall 2008

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