How To Offset Flood Dangers

According to federal and local government officialdom, before Hurricane Katrina struck, New Orleans was not in a floodplain. Obviously, nature thought otherwise.

The striking disparity between government pronouncements and reality highlights the fact that despite the best of intentions, the nation's flood-management policies and uncoordinated federal, state and local efforts ensure a repeat of the Katrina disaster, again and again.

This comes as no surprise to engineers, biologists and floodplain managers. In a recent article in the American Society of Civil Engineers magazine, Civil Engineering, Darryl W. Davis, senior adviser to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Institute for Water Resources, shows how disparate flood-control efforts, land-use planning processes and federal funding criteria results in a dysfunctional approach to flood protection. He writes, "Increasingly substantial evidence suggests that the present approach to managing flood threats in the United States is not sustainable with respect to public safety and economic and environmental consequences. Despite efforts by various levels of government as well as the private sector, flood damage continues to increase, more lives are threatened, and the ecological functions of floodplains continue to be degraded."

The consequences of these dysfunctional approaches are not just a problem in Louisiana. In California, levees line the banks of rivers, confining once extensive streamside forests to thin ribbons of green and ensuring that swift, concentrated floodwaters have ready access to erode and overwhelm vulnerable levees


In the meantime, developers do what they do, aided by local governments pursuing expanded tax revenues. So behind, and often well below, these levees, subdivisions sprout up, lured by government pronouncements that these lands are no longer part of a floodplain and are free from floodplain building and siting requirements.