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Lessons From The Midwest Floods

Posted on April 7, 2008 | Filed Under Flood Protection, Great Lakes, Great Rivers, River Renewal

Rebecca Wodder
President

Disastrous floods. We experienced them back in December in the Pacific Northwest. Now, more recently, devastating floodwaters submerged parts of the Midwest.

We know that these kinds of rain storms and flooding will become more frequent and severe with global warming. How can communities prepare? What lessons can we learn?

One thing is certain: while engineered solutions like levees are necessary in some places, for the most part they are costly and can create a false sense of security. Levees can encourage unwise floodplain development and increase flood damage costs, while also destroying some of the natural features that prevent downstream flooding, as well as river access and fish and wildlife habitat.

Take the Missouri River. In 1993, the Missouri River flooded, in what local residents came to call the “Great Flood,�? one of the most destructive in the history of the Mississippi River basin. 70,000 people were evacuated, 50,000 homes damaged, nearly 50 people killed and a total cost in damage exceeding $16 billion dollars.

Following the floods in 1993, American Rivers helped convince the Federal Emergency Management Agency to use some of the disaster relief funds to help families move out of harm’s way. The agency worked in nine states to move roughly 10,000 homes and businesses to higher ground and to restore floodplains so that they could act as natural buffers. One village downriver from St. Louis picked up and moved two miles away to a site 400 feet above the Mississippi floodplain. When another flood hit the region two years later, these people were high and dry.

But this example of smart rebuilding is the exception, not the rule. In the very area that in 1993 was under 10 feet of water, developers have built strip malls, office parks and 28,000 new homes! In the St. Louis area, there’s been more building on the floodplain since 1993, than in its entire prior history.

The victims here are the families that invested their life savings in these homes, believing the promise of developers and local elected officials that they were safe. These false promises continue, and we owe the families in America’s river communities better.

We can’t rely on the engineered fixes of the past. While levees will still play a role in flood management, we need to focus on common-sense, cost-effective natural flood protection solutions like restoring wetlands, keeping people out of harm’s way in the first place, and allowing rivers to follow natural, meandering channels.

Our approach must be to work with nature and not against it. Working with nature, we can have clean, healthy rivers that make communities more resilient, more able to withstand droughts and floods in the years to come.

This post was first published on Treehugger.

Yazoo Pumps Comments Due Today!!!

Posted on January 22, 2008 | Filed Under Alerts, Deep South, Flood Protection, Government Affairs, River Renewal

Joyce Wu, Program Associate
Natural Flood Protection

Comments to the Corps on the Yazoo Pumps, a 67 year-old project that will destroy 200,000 acres of wetlands, are due today, Jan. 22nd, 2008. Please take a few moments to send a letter to the Corps to show your opposition to this boondoggle project, which over 500 scientists say is a bad idea. https://secure2.convio.net/amr/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=961

You can find more information on the Yazoo Pumps at http://www.americanrivers.org/site/PageServer?pagename=AR7_YazooPumpsLetter.

Why did the salmon cross the road?

Posted on December 7, 2007 | Filed Under Flood Protection, Northwest

Amy Kober
Northwest Outreach & Communications Director

…because it was flooded…

(I love how the neighbors cheer the salmon on!)

Rob Masonis talks about Northwest floods

Posted on December 7, 2007 | Filed Under Flood Protection, Northwest

Amy Kober
Northwest Outreach & Communications Director

Listen to Rob Masonis, senior director of our Northwest office, talk about the recent flooding, and better solutions for rivers and communities (KPLU radio link)

Rob was also featured in a segment on OPB radio.

Lessons from flooding in the Pacific Northwest

Posted on December 6, 2007 | Filed Under Flood Protection, Global Warming, Northwest

Amy Kober
Northwest Outreach & Communications Director

The pictures in the press over the past several days — people stranded on rooftops, I-5 under water, basements full of mud — have been astonishing, sad, awful. My heart goes out to all of the people who lost loved ones and property to the floods.

It is great to see the huge outpouring of support to help flood victims. Here’s a run-down of how you can help.

We shouldn’t lose the opportunity to see these floods as a wake-up call: we need to rethink our flood protection strategies. For the sake of public safety, the economy, clean water, salmon recovery, our environment and well-being.

Throughout much of American history, rivers have been treated as problems that must be “solved�? through large scale engineering projects. As a result, rivers have been clogged with dams, straightened and channelized, cut off from their floodplains and even buried underground.

Unfortunately, these approaches have often exacerbated the very problems they were meant to solve. Despite spending more than $25 billion on federal levees and dams, national flood losses continue to rise.

Engineered solutions are costly and can create a false sense of security, encouraging unwise floodplain development and increasing flood damage costs, while also destroying some of the natural features that prevent downstream flooding, as well as river access and fish and wildlife habitat.

Levees should be the last line of defense, not the first. The Association of State Floodplain Managers states that levees “should be used only as a method of last resort for providing a limited means of flood risk protection for existing development.”

Experts predict the frequency and intensity of rain storms and flooding will increase with global warming, leading to even more dire consequences from the failed policies of engineered rivers.

Natural river and wetland systems act as natural sponges and basins and absorb flood waters. They also act as barriers between storm surges and buildings and people, filter polluted water, and provide critical fish and wildlife habitat. Even having 4-5% wetland coverage in a watershed can reduce peak floods by 50%.

The following three tips not only provide flood protection, they also deliver many other benefits — clean water, recreation, wildlife, quality of life — that we need and enjoy.

TIPS FOR SAFEGUARDING COMMUNITIES:

1. Protect wetlands, forests and streamside vegetation — Wetlands and natural vegetation help absorb floodwaters and can serve as barriers between floodwaters and homes. Wetlands also help filter pollution and give us clean water.

2. Manage stormwater naturally — Run-off from roads should be allowed to seep back into the ground, so it doesn’t overwhelm drains and sewers (Crosscut has a great article about stormwater and Puget Sound). Not only does this help reduce local flooding, it also re-charges underground aquifers.

3. Stop building in floodplains — Keep new development out of floodplains and, where possible, move existing homes out of harm’s way. Parks and natural areas enhance community access to river recreation and provide habitat for birds, fish and wildlife.

(In densely populated urban areas, these natural flood protection strategies can be successfully used in combination with traditional measures)

By working with nature and not against it we can help strengthen the resilience of communities in the face of global warming, and make sure we have clean, healthy rivers.

Additional resources:

Unnatural disasters, natural solutions: lessons from the flooding of New Orleans (PDF)

In Harm’s Way: a report on floods and floodplains (PDF)

Fun Facts on Yazoo, con’t.

Posted on November 13, 2007 | Filed Under Deep South, Flood Protection, Government Affairs, River Renewal, Southeast

Joyce Wu, Program Associate
Natural Flood Protection

In a previous blog entry, I posted some information on the environmental damage that the Yazoo Pumps would cause, drawing this response from Mr. Frank Worley, a Corps public affairs official:

“The Yazoo Backwater project is not designed, nor intended to ‘drain’ anything, but to lower flood levels in the Delta.

The project includes a pump station and also includes a huge non-structural component which is the purchase of conservation easements to reforest 55,600 acres of land that will never again be used for agriculture.

The pump station would only be operated during specific backwater flood conditions. We invite you to review the final report when it is released for more specific details on the project as proposed.”

First of all, I want to thank Mr. Worley for taking an interest in and commenting on the AR blog site. American Rivers appreciates any opportunity to engage in a dialogue about our work, and the part of the purpose of blogging was exactly to spark this kind of discussion.

In response to Mr. Worley’s comment, I would like to quote from two documents on which the information in the post is based. These documents are from the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, two federal agencies that have formally protested the Yazoo Backwater Pumps project because of the major damage it will cause to wetlands and other natural resources. These documents provide the most recent information available to the public on the Yazoo Pumps; we look forward to reading the Final EIS when it is published.

In a letter to the Corps’ Vicksburg Disctrict on November 3, 2000, EPA:

wrote that the Yazoo Pumps would “result in adverse impacts to over 200,000 acres of wetlands in the Mississippi River floodplain, cause water quality impairment, and further degrade already impaired waters.�?
gave the Yazoo Pumps its lowest rating (Environmentally Unsatisfactory-3), and said that the project was appropraite for a Clean Water Act veto because of its “substantial and unacceptable adverse environmental consequences.” (There have only been 11 Clean Water Act vetoes ever, so it is clear that the Pumps pose a major threat to the environment.)
noted that the damage that would be caused by the Pumps could be largely avoided by the use of a nonstructural alternative proposed by researchers from Virginia Tech University and the US Geological Survey.
expressed concern about its perception that the Corps did not appear at all to seriously consider a nonstructural alternative to building a pumping plant to pump water out of, and thus draining, the Yazoo Backwater area.

In its October 2006 Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act report, the US Fish and Wildlife Service:

wrote that the Yazoo Pumps would cut off the hydrological cycle of backwater flooding that “is critically important to maintenance of project-area wetland and aquatic habitat values, including fisheries production.�? This flooding cycle provides the biochemical link to the rest of the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley ecosystem.
concluded that the Corps’ plan for the Yazoo Pumps is “ecologically unsound.�?
commented that the Corps’ recommended plan is “one of the most environmentally damaging alternatives of 35 proposals that were initially developed during the consensus-building process. Reasonable alternatives involving nonstructural, flood damage reduction features [were] rejected without being thoroughly evaluated.�?

We at American Rivers recognize that structural flood reduction projects may well be necessary when large populations and critical infrastructure are at risk, such as in the New Orleans area. However, the Corps has the legal responsibility not to construct such projects until it has demonstrated that other less costly and less environmentally damaging alternatives could not do the job. According to EPA and FWS, the Corps has not come close to meeting this burden in the case of the Yazoo Pumps project, but instead recommended an incredibly costly wetland drainage project that will cause far-reaching and permanent environmental harm.

Again, we welcome dialogue on our work, and invite continued discussion on this important issue.

The New York Times Weighs In on the Yazoo Pumps

Posted on November 6, 2007 | Filed Under Deep South, Flood Protection, Government Affairs, River Renewal, Southeast

Joyce Wu, Program Associate
Natural Flood Protection

With the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Yazoo Pumps–a destructive and fiscally irresponsible Army Corps of Engineers project in southern Mississippi–due at the end of the week, the New York Times published this spot-on editorial on the project today:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/opinion/06tue3.html?th&emc=th

Help Stop Floodplain Development in Eastern PA

Posted on November 2, 2007 | Filed Under Flood Protection, Mid-Atlantic, River Renewal, Wild and Scenic

Joyce Wu, Program Associate
Natural Flood Protection

The federal government and local agencies want to build a 12-story bus depot, parking garage and condominium development in the Delaware River floodplain – on a site that has been repeatedly covered by floodwaters. The proposed development, the Riverwalk, would loom over historic districts in Easton and Phillipsburg, PA. You can help stop this development and keep people safe from future flooding!

Please attend a public hearing to oppose this affront to Easton, Phillipsburg, and the Wild and Scenic Delaware River. The ONLY PUBLIC HEARING will be held on Monday, Nov. 15th at 6:00 pm, in Easton City Council Chambers, 5th Floor, Alpha Building, 1 South Third St., Easton, PA.

You can also help by sending a letter to the Lehigh and Northampton Transportation Authority (LANTA) and telling them to protect the Wild and Scenic Delaware River and the would-be victims of future flooding!

Funny (scary?) video from “The Onion” on dam failure

Posted on October 24, 2007 | Filed Under Dam Removal, Flood Protection, Northwest

Amy Kober
Northwest Outreach & Communications Director

Only The Onion can make dam failure humorous.

Watch their video, Preemptive Memorial Honors Future Victims of Imminent Dam Disaster.

Preemptive Memorial Honors Future Victims Of Imminent Dam Disaster

This funny-but-scary video was likely inspired by our recent work on dam safety in the media, including a story featuring our president Rebecca Wodder on CNN.

Fun Facts on Yazoo, or, Why the Corps Should Dump the Pumps

Posted on October 19, 2007 | Filed Under Deep South, Flood Protection, Government Affairs, River Renewal, Southeast

Joyce Wu, Program Associate
Natural Flood Protection

In 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded that the Yazoo Pumps would drain and damage more than 200,000 acres of ecologically significant wetlands in the heart of the
Mississippi River flyway – a critical migration route for 20 percent of the nation’s duck populations. That is seven times more wetlands than all the nation’s private developers harm in one year nationwide. The Corps recently acknowledged that 26,300 acres would be drained dry. All of this damage will happen in an area that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) describes as having some of the richest natural resources in the nation.

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