Living in southwest Illinois, we have front row seats to the “gathering of the waters”—the Mississippi River and its numerous tributaries, including the Illinois, Missouri, and the Ohio. Draining 45% of the United States, the Mississippi's watershed ranks as the second largest in the world. It is also one of the most engineered river basins on Earth, with two thousand miles of levees and twenty-nine pairs of locks and dams on the Upper Mississippi.
A gemstone of a book, Mississippi River Tragedies: A Century of Unnatural Disaster (Klein & Zellmer) reads like a good mystery novel on how Congress, commerce, and the Army Corp attempted to tame this “stubborn and willfully disobedient river” over the past century. They have leveed, straightened, channeled, dammed, wing diked, and rip rapped rivers in the name of navigating interests, and, beginning in the 1930s, flood control. For decades Sierra Club has documented the folly and public costs to bend the river to human will, to place the flowing waters in a straightjacket of levees and channels.
The authors focus on major flood events (1913, 1927, 1993, Katrina-2002). After each flood or hurricane, with our short attention span, it's back to business as usual. When levees were breached in the Chesterfield area (Missouri River) in the 1993 flood, people sought funds to construct wider and higher levees, which only further served to cut the river from its natural pressure release valve—the floodplains. According to Klein & Zellmer, new rounds of levee upgrading often backfire by increasing rather than decreasing the destructive power unleashed by the natural forces of water. New flood control promises more than it can deliver.
The book maintains that floods are not acts of God or natural disasters but “unnatural disasters” made worse by those in power who make unnecessarily risky decisions. Citizens pick up the tab, which often runs in the billions of dollars. Low income communities and people of color have largely borne the brunt of these decisions as they tend to wind up in harm’s way. The authors use personal histories from the 1927 flood and Katrina (2002) to effectively reveal the selective injustices during times of disaster. Low income people lack the financial means to settle in safer areas, evacuate during a disaster, or purchase flood insurance.
If you love rivers, think rivers should have room to flood, and believe in keeping people safe from harm’s way, check out the book. What knowledge is necessary to avoid future disasters? Three lessons stand out in the book: rivers will flood, levees will break, and unwise floodplain development will happen if we let it..
Wayne Politsch