High Water leads to Slippery Slope
 

Smithsonian Magazine (Nov-05) has a great article about the great flood of 1927 and it’s after effects on the country. When I Googled “1927 flood” I got 919,000 hits….WTF?
Well, it seems there were a number of floods around the country that year. The flood in the heartland, down the Mississippi, was the one that is described as the worst natural disaster to hit the US, until Katrina.
Here is the timeline.

What I found most interesting was this part of the article: Since most of the flood victims were farmers, common folk, or in the south where they dynamited the levees to save New Orleans, flooding the poor Blacks, the fat cats said let them fend for themselves.

Half of the Blacks, after being shut out of private relief efforts, packed up and moved north to the cities

Hoover used private corporations to help reconstruction. Sound Familiar?

The call for government action by the people spured the federal involvment in peoples lives that has grown to the nanny state we have today.

I wonder how this year's hurricanes will contribute to federal influence growth? :footpyth:

failure=growth

Failure->Growth->Failure->Growth->....

It's a positive feedback loop. It will cease when the government takes up 100% of the GDP, and will end in the following disasterous collapse.

Randy Newman wrote Louisiana 1927 quite some time ago. It got some revived airplay after Katrina.

I liked it well enough to buy his greatest hits CD.

bump

Wonder if we, as a whole, still feel that was a nanny state - compared to where we are apparently headed.

That's also when blacks stopped voting republican. From history or A&E channel?

ISTR that's also when the Corps of Engineers began to have an expanded mission. All at the behest of politicians, you understand.

The problem with flood control is that it's impossible. We can't 'control' floods. We'd be a lot better off leaving the floodplains to mother nature. Here's an interesting policy paper regarding the future of floodplain management.

Username: Alluvial
Location: central Mississippi

Sounds like this guy is gonna know about floods.

I've read a couple of sources lambasting federal flood aid and insurance, because it is so badly worded that it basically encourages people to ignore flood risk when building, resulting in people building homes and towns in extremely flood-prone places.
I believe in community helping each other, and that government is, or at least should be, simply the organised community, so I support government assistance to disaster victims. But that doesn't mean we should encourage people to stand in the way of danger. Duh.

That would be a gal. ;)

Flood studies and all things hydrology/hydraulics are my line of work, so although I'll never know all of it, I'm working on getting a good grasp of it. Thanks for the vote of confidence. :blush:

Hey, I never claimed to be a gynacologist ...

Historically, towns and cities grew up along the waterways. Then the suburbs grew up around those towns and cities, so there is a lot of people living near the rivers. It would be a Herculean task to move them all.
And where are we going to get the food that's grown on those millions of acres of flood prone land, if nobody is allowed to continue their farms there?

Farming, yes, but granting building approval and subsidised insurance for new developments, IMHO, no.

We've done a fine old job of fucking up our flood systems over here in the UK. Floodplains you say? Oh well they'd be the bits we drained and banged housing on right?

That's all true. One thing that the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is trying to do in the states is to get people to relocate out of frequently flooded homes & businesses. That's a bit different than wholescale relocation of towns - although that's been done too. Here is an interesting publication which showcases some mitigation stories from the 1993 floods in Missouri, including some relocations.

Many structures would benefit from simple elevation. Here is an article about a couple who had their home elevated 10 feet above the original grade. Although the home had suffered several floods, including 53 inches of water from Hurricane Georges, after the elevation it didn't, even from Katrina.

I didn't mean to relocate the farms. People living there would need to be protected from flood, although some areas are just so low that you oughtn't put a home there.

Like New Orleans? :eyebrow:

IMO a big problem with NoLa is that the land is subsiding. Sure, we could put fill dirt in, or raise buildings, but that would just eventually sink too. So, mitigation there is quite problematic. (I looove that smiley !!)

From a coldly logical standpoint, the port and associated warehouse district are the only necessary things in NoLa. People other than those manning the port & appurtenances don't have a necessity to live there. (Mind you, I'm not suggesting that everyone flee the city).

From a social standpoint, the city is very rich in history and has a lot of cultural significance for the United States. It is irreplacable in that respect.

There are many historical areas in a similar pickle. As Bruce mentioned, people tend to congregate and build around rivers. How do we preserve history and heritage while at the same time promoting better floodplain management? Tough decisions.

Zen, the phenomenon you mention has been a hot topic of discussion in the industry. What happened is that developers were attracted to floodplain lands sorta by default - because the land was cheaper. In effect, the creation of the NFIP and publishing of the flood zone maps made it possible for those developers to make a good living from building things in the floodplain. Today's homebuyer isn't as savvy about what constitutes a 'good building site' as folks in more agrarian days were, and is often completely unaware of nearby flooding sources and the risks of building there.

One small correction: the NFIP isn't subsidized by the government. The NFIP is funded solely by flood insurance premiums.

From here.

And those premiums have gone up like crazy for the last few years.

Yes, they have, especially for businesses. The NFIP used to subsidize everyone's premiums; in other words, although the property might've been rated as highly suceptible to flooding based on the zone it's in, the premium wasn't based on the actual risk. Going back to cold logic, the premium properly ought to be based upon the flood risk. But, if they had all been properly rated, people wouldn't have been able to afford the premiums and the program would have been a failure.

After the floods of the 1990's, the NFIP changed their ways and stopped subsidizing premiums for businesses, and also put some 'teeth' into their regs. Business owners got quite a shock, because many of them were paying small premiums based compared to their actual risk. Example: business owner previously paying $500/yr in premiums now paying $2000/yr. The premiums for businesses were changed to reflect the true risk, while residential properties continue to be subsidized, although not as much as before.

Now for the 'teeth' I mentioned. Often a home or business is what they call "frequently flooded". The NFIP took a look back over their historic data and saw that many of these structures had claims stretching back ten years or more; in fact, often the insurance payouts, after adding them all together, exceeded the value of the structure. In an effort to stem this hemorraging, they put a mitigation plan into effect. This says that if your building sustains more than 50% of its value in damages over a certain period of time, then you *must* mitigate for flood or you won't be able to buy flood insurance any more. That's for damages including all hazards, including things like fire or tornado. Let's say you have submitted claims for property damage from flooding ten times in the last twelve years, and today it burns to the ground. When you rebuild it tomorrow, you must elevate the lowest finished floor above the base flood elevation, or you won't be able to get flood insurance from the NFIP.

I hope I'm explaining this in an understandable way - since I'm around it all the time, sometimes I accidentally leave pertinent parts out.

No, that sums it up quite nicely. As a matter of fact, I've read tons of mailings from them that could have all been replaced with your post. :haha:

We are forced to purchase flood insurance for our home here in this drought-stricken area because a couple of rooms are 1" below the 100 year flood level. One inch. One hundred years. It costs us around $1600/year to live near a very shallow lake that has a spillway so it couldn't flood regardless. :thepain:
Even so, I agree with not encouraging or rewarding the construction of dwellings near streams. It is easy to see the natural meanders of streams when flying, yet people will put their houses there.

What kind of construction is it? Is there any way to elevate those two rooms?

Looking at old meanders out of the airplane window is one of my favorite things to do. :)

The only room that would be easy to raise is the great room, but it is already raised. The others have plumbing in the slab and lower ceilings. And yes, geological features are wonderfully apparent from above - if only the aircraft would slow down and let me enjoy the view for a while!

I realized later, after I posted that, that if you're wanting to get a structure removed from the special flood hazard area, then the new application forms require the 'lowest adjacent grade' rather than the finished floor. So it wouldn't help ya anyway.

In one of the 'burbs north of Philly, they are paying to jack up the houses along one creek because they flood so often.

http://blogs.phillyburbs.com/news/bc...lood-proofing/

There are some different grants which FEMA gives out, which pay for projects like that. It's a great program. They've even been successful in raising slab-on-grade homes. Here is a story about a New Orleans family who had theirs raised 7.5 feet. There were several success stories on the Gulf Coast, where HMGP funds were used to elevate some houses, which kept them from flooding from Katrina.

Here in Pennsylvania we are still paying an "emergency" liquor tax created to handle the 1889 Johnstown flood.

The Johnstown flood was a 'manmade flood' caused by the failure of private dams owned by a number of rich people who were never held responsible.

Damm. Here, here.

I didn't realize that tax was still on the books!

That was a horrible flood; some of the victims were swept to a debris jam which caught on fire and burned many people. I can't remember where the web site was, but I read some very interesting transcripts of interviews done at the time with railroad employees.

That South Fork dam wasn't well built to start with, then the owners futzed around lowering the crest and whatnot. A bad situation.

That seems somehow unfair. Picture the afterlife.

"What happened to you?"
"Killed in a flood"
"Tough luck. Drowned?"
"Nah, burned."
"WTF?"

I know! Picture the headstone:

"Burnt to death in the Johnstown flood of 1889".

Say what?

If one is interested in historic dam breaks, some to read about are the St. Francis dam (California), Malpasset Dam (France) and Grand Teton Dam (Idaho).