Emergency Management - Fall 2008 - (Page 27)

Here is an example of a detention pond in Tulsa, Okla. The area was continually hit with major ﬂoods until a crucial effort to produce new strategies. PHOTO COURTESY OF FEMA A house near the Mississippi River is flooded. detention ponds to hold water back and release it more slowly,” Patton said. “We have a lot of trails and parks that are in the floodplain and fewer buildings.” Tulsa ramped up its maintenance drainage systems, which had been neglected due to a lack of funds. The city imposed a fee on utility bills to help keep up with the maintenance. It was all part of a balanced approach. “One thing we learned was that in trying to address some of the problems on a spot basis, we actually made them worse,” Patton said. “We realized that you have to look at floodwater management on a comprehensive basis. You can actually make your community better — not only safer, but better by using the resource.” A Humble Approach Tulsa’s approach is to work with nature “with some humility,” Patton said. And it’s an appropriate concept, experts say. “Tulsa has a terribly balanced approach,” Galloway said. “They’re probably the poster child.” Tulsa’s success story took decades and still isn’t finished, Patton said. “When the wrong kind of rain comes — and it could have been Hurricane Ike — there will be more water over the land than we want, but hopefully it won’t be as bad. We haven’t fixed it; we’ve ameliorated it.” And that’s the idea. “People have this idea of flooding as bad,” Freitag said. “It’s just change.” He and the others said communities must learn to live with the flooding, and even benefit from it. “Floods are natural events,” Galloway said. “By leveeing off so much of the floodplain, we’ve prevented regeneration of the soils. And that’s one of the major problems in coastal Louisiana. We’ve destroyed much of the wetlands by taking the sediment and dumping it in the Gulf of Mexico.” The sediment acts as nature’s sponge, helping store the water and regenerate the soil, which perpetuates the process. In the Northwest, retaining water in the upper watersheds to continue that natural process is becoming more of a challenge. “What we’re going to have here in the Northwest as we lose those snow storages, is streams that are going to peak earlier and summers that are drier and we’re going to have to capture water everywhere.” Freitag said the Northwest is blessed with valleys filled with river sediment, which, along with depressions like detention ponds, can help keep water in the upper watersheds for a little longer. “If we can keep the water in the upper watersheds for just a couple of months between seasons, we can dampen a lot of the change that is forecast because of the climate,” he said. The idea is to use the floodplain for storage as much as possible, and any depression — ponds, beaver dams — will aid that process. It’s just one part of a balanced approach that’s necessary to living with nature’s floods. k PHOTO BY JOCELYN AUGUSTINO/FEMA Emergency Management 27 PHOTO BY NAME/FEMA Freitag said. “They’ve removed some of the tax base at a cost, but they don’t have to have huge repairs and now they have more attractive areas.” It started with a citizen-driven movement that eventually gained support from City Hall, said Ann Patton, a founding partner of Tulsa’s Project Impact, part of a short-lived federal initiative aimed at creating disaster-resistant communities. “We’ve moved well over a thousand buildings out of the floodplains physically; we’ve done a lot of visually appealing

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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