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Author Topic: Old Man River and the ethics of levees  (Read 2053 times)

RedKing

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Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« on: May 10, 2011, 12:19:44 pm »

For those who might not be aware, the Mississippi River is flooding. Bigtime. Heavy snows this winter and heavy spring rains in the Midwest have contributed to the highest river levels since 1937. The river crested today at Memphis, Tennessee at over 47 feet -- 14 feet above flood stage.

Levees and sandbagging protected the historic portions of the city (Graceland, Beale Street, various recording studios), but at what cost? the water backed up into tributaries and less-protected portions of West Memphis and suburbs, mostly populated by lower-income minority residents.

The crest will head south now, into Mississippi and Arkansas, before finally heading into Louisiana and at the terminus--New Orleans, a city that has been on the shit-end of the stick for close to a decade now.

And in an indirect way, New Orleans is about to be shit on by every other community that lives upriver of it, from Minnesota all the way down. Every time a community on the river hides behind its levees and sandbag walls, it's in effect displacing its flood burden downriver. This wouldn't be such an issue if there were open sections further down where the floodwater could release before hitting the next populated area. But there aren't. There are towns and cities, levees and floodwalls all up and down virtually the entire Mississippi River. Which means that when you have storms across a large section of the river, all the localized minor flooding that you would normally have get rolled into one big old ball of water which gets pushed downstream.

It ends up being left to someone like the Army Corps of Engineers to be the 'bad guy' and make the cold, calculating decisions of who gets to be deliberately flooded as a sacrifice to ease the threat to major areas downriver. As is about to happen in Louisiana, where they plan to open the Morganza spillway and let 300,000 cubic feet of water per second drain through, inundating the land on the other side with as much as 25 feet of water. People who live in that area? Welp, they're pretty much fucked. I don't even know if they can sue for compensation. This is being done to spare Baton Rouge and areas further downriver, as their levees may not hold otherwise. While I'm not saying we should let Baton Rouge flood, it also can't be ignored that the people who are going to get flooded are again the ones who are already poor and don't have political clout.

What's people thoughts on this? I've been an advocate for some years now of just making flooded areas along the Mississippi into a watershed and not allowing rebuilding. Same for some hurricane-prone coastal areas. At some point you're just making a devil's bargain to live there, and it's unfair to ask others to help pay the cost of rebuilding every few years when this happens. Plus, in both cases, having uninhabited wilderness areas could help reduce the damage for the inhabited areas that remain by absorbing floodwater. Problem is, mandating something like is large-scale 'social engineering' and likely would face a lot of opposition on the grounds of private property, 'freedom', etc.

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woose1

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #1 on: May 10, 2011, 12:34:54 pm »

I'm not sure why someone would want to live in Louisiana in the first place. :/
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Is there any other option to prevent the more populated areas from being flooded? At some point you kind of just have to take the best option available to you, I suppose.
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Criptfeind

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #2 on: May 10, 2011, 12:38:10 pm »

I am for floods causing the least amount of damage, even if that means purposefully flooding some peoples area. I am also for reimbursement, or even better, wildlife reserves made to take the flooding.
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Cthulhu

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #3 on: May 10, 2011, 12:51:41 pm »

I have to agree.  It'll suck for the people who have to live somewhere else, but eventually we won't have this kind of problem anymore because we'll have places to let the floods run off that no one lives in.
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RedKing

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #4 on: May 10, 2011, 01:12:44 pm »

Well, the option thus far has been "build taller/bigger levies". Which is why the river can get to 14 feet above flood stage and still not be flooding. When the walls still aren't big enough, they make temporary sandbag walls on top of the walls.

All this does though, is forestall the problem and in the end, make it worse because you're dealing with that much more water downstream.

By the time it gets to Louisiana, you're talking about engineering on a mega-scale. One of the big concerns (and a large part of the decision to open the Morganza spillway) is what's known as the Old River Control Structure, a system of floodgates that works to divert water away from the Atchafalaya River and into the Mississippi.

Why? Because Mother Nature doesn't want the mouth of the Mississippi to stay in New Orleans. Over time, natural dynamics have increased the flow into the Atchafalaya (which branches off of the Mississippi in northern Louisiana and heads in a much steeper and more direct path to the Gulf of Mexico. If allowed to do so, the port facilities in places like New Orleans would eventually not really work, and the new Mississippi Delta would be hundreds of miles to the west. River traffic would be changed and billions of dollars in commerce would bypass the Big Easy.

The problem is, if the Old River Control Structure fails, then this change will happen anyways. All at once. The damage would be unbelievable, reshaping the Louisiana coastline and utterly submerging chunks of south central Louisiana. New Orleans, after a few years of sedimentation and lower flow, would be sitting in a giant mud flat.

But going back to the original question, so what? Should we continue to try and essentially terraform one of the largest rivers on the planet, at considerable cost and knowing that it only forestalls future problems just like this, only bigger? Or do we at some point decide to let Nature have its way, evacuate a huge area of all habitation, and let events play out?

Should we start trying to reduce the levees and accept a certain measure of flooding, in the attempt to prevent it larger floods later? Should states downriver get any kind of compensation from states upriver, whose levees contributed to the severity of their more southerly neighbors' plight?

There's a similar collective action problem along beachfront properties, where erosion caused by longshore waves picks up sand from your chunk of beach and transports it down-current to your neighbor's beach. To combat this, you can build a groyne, which is a kind of wall used to trap sand movement and create stable beach. However, this results in an even higher rate of erosion on the backside of the groyne. So your neighbor downstream now has to build an even larger groyne to retain his beach. His neighbor has to build one even bigger than that, and so forth. Once you get to the end of the series, the amount of erosion behind the last (terminal) groyne can be severe, a condition known as terminal groyne syndrome.

The solutions have been varied. In North Carolina, they just flat-out outlawed groynes and basically said, "Beach erosion is just part of owning a beach house." You're allowed to truck in a certain amount of sand per year, IIRC, but as the Outer Banks are migrating islands, eventually that house on the regressing side of the island is going to be underwater. Them's just the breaks.

In South Carolina, they allowed groynes, so in heavily built-up places like Myrtle Beach, you have condos and hotels on the beach with ridiculously long groynes so that "their" beach is assured, and I can only imagine what the backcut erosion is like once you get past the heavily commercial areas.



EDIT: Here's a map of the projected flooding if/when they open the Morganza spillway at 50%, to give you an idea of the scale involved:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 

« Last Edit: May 10, 2011, 01:24:15 pm by RedKing »
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IronyOwl

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #5 on: May 10, 2011, 02:41:11 pm »

Yeah, I'm generally in favor of letting Nature take its course, for two reasons.

First of all, it's generally better to have constant, small amounts of pain than to put it off as long as possible, then have a major catastrophe when it does go wrong. Many, many solutions to problems make the problem worse as they avoid it, or take the easy short-term way out while sacrificing long-term effectiveness or efficiency.

Secondly, it's generally pretty rare that you can solve a problem by shunting it elsewhere. Traditionally that's always been the first thing anyone tries, but at some point you run out of elsewhere, and for most problems that happens rather fast or is in effect from the get-go. Leaving problems where they lie is arguably the fairest way to handle this issue, since you're leaving it up to weather or geography rather than a committee or governor.
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Lagslayer

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #6 on: May 10, 2011, 02:49:52 pm »

It sucks, but when you live in the river bed, it's going to happen eventually. And if you happen to be below sea level and live right next to the ocean AND a river, It's just going to be that much worse. To the people getting flooded, I hope you bought insurance. And New Orleans, we should NOT be rebuilding it there.

RedKing

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #7 on: May 10, 2011, 02:58:48 pm »

But at the same time, it's easy to say that. It's not as easy to force that. Or to be the politician who allows billions of dollars of economic disruption.

This isn't like Cuba, where they can force mandatory evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people smoothly; or China, where they can build the Three Gorges Damn and evict millions of people from their land with pittance for compensation and no real plan of where to put them.

And no community wants to be the first to reduce their protection, because they know they'll be devastated while places like St. Louis and Memphis are likely going to continue to sit high and dry behind their walls. The burden gets pushed off onto the communities least able to argue for themselves.
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nenjin

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #8 on: May 10, 2011, 03:34:00 pm »

I'm afraid I'm siding with nature here too. As Americans, we've built cities and things we really had no business building. I just watched a piece on California's water usage last night. We turned a western desert into a lush agricultural farm land that requires more water combined than the next largest 7 American cities.

Choices made in the past have set us up for hard decisions today. You already mentioned beach-front property owners. We have the ability to look 50 years down the road now before we choose building sites, whereas we didn't before. New Orleans may have been the ideal spot for a port in the past, but would it have passed muster with today's understanding of geology, drainage and flood mechanics?

So I dunno. We're going to see more and more of this, as large American cities are put under the gun. If sea levels globally continue to rise, New Orleans was fucked anyways, as is half the Gulf Coast. Florida is going to be gone in a few decades as the sea levels continue to rise.

There's really nothing we can do except try and minimize damage where damage is least likely to naturally occur.
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RedKing

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #9 on: May 10, 2011, 03:41:47 pm »

I'm in agreement with y'all, but my question is: how do you fix it? It's not like Civilization, where you can say, "I won't send any more Settlers to rebuild in that grid space".

People who have lost everything are still often going to want to rebuild in the same spot, and they're going to look to the government for help. How do you stop them from rebuilding without pretty much saying, "You're screwed. No house, no livelihood. You're going to have to move, but you probably can't afford to. Have fun starving!"

I suppose the government could try to purchase land to prevent rebuilding, and encourage people to use the funds they get from their sale to move, but in a lot of cases of high-density, low-income areas like West Memphis or parts of New Orleans, people don't even own the spot they live in, so they got nothing. Rural land owners might be a little better off, but are unlikely to be able to find similar productive land for the money they'll get. And if they only know how to farm a couple of things which are climate-specific, they have even less options. You can't relocate a rice farmer from Mississippi up into the Dakota prairie without some major retraining (and a willingness on their part to move that far and available land in the Dakotas)

I'm sympathetic to policymakers on this...it's a problem with an obvious solution, but the devil is in the implementation.

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nenjin

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #10 on: May 10, 2011, 03:53:54 pm »

I see two options:

-Massive investment in the Gulf drainage system. Which will address river flooding, but not rising sea levels. Since storm surges will crest higher than any sane wall we would build.

-Massive government assistance for Gulf Coast relocation programs. Even worded like that, it sounds unpleasant. I'm not advocating turning the Gulf Coast into ghost towns....but people need to disabuse themselves of the fantasy with the coast. Vital industries need to be looked at to decide if they're better operating on the coast or whether they should be relocated. The whole Gulf Coast needs to adjust its economic base around the new emerging ecological realities. You can't live off tourism, oranges and huge fisheries when the sea level might be increasing a foot or more a year, and storm surges can go up to 3 or 4 miles inland.

For the longest time, the coasts have been the focus of American investment, pride and growth. Waterside property was best property, and the interior is for camping, agriculture and slow living. We need to start look at where to live and places to build that are sustainable and rational.....no more projects and visions like the stuff that produced Key West. We need to start treating the rivers and seas like they're dangerous and not just worth a ton of money.
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Lagslayer

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #11 on: May 10, 2011, 04:30:06 pm »

Don't bail out people who refuse to buy insurance. If you want to try to live there, fine, but you gotta pay.

nenjin

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #12 on: May 10, 2011, 04:35:11 pm »

Well, even people that had insurance were getting dicked over by the insurance companies, some of who tried to refuse flood insurance payments during Katrina.
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IronyOwl

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #13 on: May 10, 2011, 04:37:51 pm »

I'm in agreement with y'all, but my question is: how do you fix it? It's not like Civilization, where you can say, "I won't send any more Settlers to rebuild in that grid space".

People who have lost everything are still often going to want to rebuild in the same spot, and they're going to look to the government for help. How do you stop them from rebuilding without pretty much saying, "You're screwed. No house, no livelihood. You're going to have to move, but you probably can't afford to. Have fun starving!"

I suppose the government could try to purchase land to prevent rebuilding, and encourage people to use the funds they get from their sale to move, but in a lot of cases of high-density, low-income areas like West Memphis or parts of New Orleans, people don't even own the spot they live in, so they got nothing. Rural land owners might be a little better off, but are unlikely to be able to find similar productive land for the money they'll get. And if they only know how to farm a couple of things which are climate-specific, they have even less options. You can't relocate a rice farmer from Mississippi up into the Dakota prairie without some major retraining (and a willingness on their part to move that far and available land in the Dakotas)

I'm sympathetic to policymakers on this...it's a problem with an obvious solution, but the devil is in the implementation.
Yeah, it's always a bitch to get people to do anything.

The basic question, though, is whether it's simply a bad idea, or something that needs to be actively prevented. It's easy enough (relatively speaking) to say "You can't build levees," and then if people still want to live there that's their business. Enforcing it's a little trickier, and if you need to mount helicopter rescue operations every six months it can start to become unprofitable as a whole, but it's fundamentally no different from any other environmental, health, or public safety requirement.

If for some reason it's decided that people need to stop altogether, for example the cost of cleaning up the incident after it happens outweighs any benefits to whoever's paying for the cleaning, then you've got to evacuate the area. This is, of course, massively expensive and difficult and controversial, but it's only going to get more expensive as time goes on, so the question is basically "Are we too lazy and/or cheap to fix this right now, saving ourselves money and trouble in the long run?" Admittedly, the answer to that question is usually yes, but that doesn't mean it should or has to be. In particular, pointing out how much it's costing the rest of the area to subsidize some place's river ought to get most of the people who don't live right there on board, I'd think.
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Nikov

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Re: Old Man River and the ethics of levees
« Reply #14 on: May 10, 2011, 06:18:16 pm »

For a few weeks now I've been sumping out my basement and driving over some ten miles of submurged Ohio floodplain. My father farms a large area that is yet underwater and does business with everyone else currently submerged. It is going to be a pretty bad year overall from it, but next year we'll be back to the obscene crop yields this floodplain produces. Around here we ask ourselves what is the risk of a flood and the amount of gain when it doesn't, hedge our bets, and sell to someone who thinks he can manage it better if we lose out too many times. It is a risky business to live where there are semi-annual floods, but it is no different than the risks of hurricanes, earthquakes, fires or lightning bolts. One simply accepts that they happen at certain degrees of risk and considers the cost of a lightning rod or moving away from the coast. If someone thinks they can manage that risk better and buys up the house without a lighting rod or on a Flordia beach, it is their own assumption of risk. Frankly I think you'd have to be a fool to buy land below sea level in an area prone to flooding or a five-star resort where the beach is eroding away, but if you understand and accept the risk then hedge against it while investing in risk management like levees, anyone is free to do so. As far as the external effects of such practices, it depends. If enough people will be sufficiently harmed by the construction of a levee, there are lawsuits for such things.
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