Flooding and River Conservation

This is a guest blog by Tim Palmer.

In river conservation we strive to make our work and stories known, and we sometimes succeed. But when rivers flood, they always make it into the news.

In what has become a milestone in the history of American flooding, and of our responses to it, a deluge justifiably called the “Great Flood” of the Mississippi held the nation rapt in 1993 with images of mayhem and misery. But American Rivers’ then President Kevin Coyle and his media master, Randy Showstack, knew that the tale of misfortune, along with the response of mercy and recovery, was not complete without asking the hard but mandatory questions: What should we be doing differently? What can we accomplish to not just alleviate the losses but to stop them from continuing? Furthermore, how can the life and health of rivers be better reflected in the stories we tell and paths we take following a flood?

Responding to these questions, American Rivers launched an insightful campaign that looked toward actually solving the flooding problem, focusing on a brighter future rather than a tragic past. Scoring the attention of national talk-show host Larry King, plus big newspapers nationwide, Coyle and Showstack urged recognition that floods are natural events destined to reoccur no matter how much we try to stop them. Our response must be to avoid damage in the future rather than just pay for it after the harm is done.

In fact, while billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent building dams to stop floods from occurring, and more billions spent building levees to keep floods away from homes, and multi-billions more subsidizing people to rebuild in the aftermath, relatively little has been spent to protect  floodplains from new development that will otherwise aggravate future disasters, and little has been invested to help people relocate away from deadly hazards whenever the flood victims are willing to go.

The Natural Resources Defense Council recently found that every $1.70 our government spends helping people move away from flood hazards has been matched with $100 helping people stay in the danger zone by paying for relief, rebuilding, and subsidized insurance, all in order await the next flood. None of that covers the cost of the dams and levees that are too often ineffective or even hazardous with risks of over-topping and failure in the largest floods—not to mention the well-known damage that dams and levees often do to the nature of rivers.

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The challenge to public policy here goes far beyond practical and pragmatic issues of spending, and directly into the realm of river conservation with goals of healthy rivers in mind. Floods, after all, are natural events that ultimately cannot be stopped by dams and levees. Floods are necessary phenomena that shape streams with essential pools and riffles. Floods recharge groundwater that half our population depends upon for drinking supplies, that nourish riparian corridors as the most important habitats to wildlife, and that create conditions needed for fish to survive and spawn. Rivers need floods and nature needs floodplains.

High-water problems have floated to the top of public agendas ever since the Flood Control Act of 1936, which unleashed a fifty-year frenzy of dam building on virtually every major river in America. Seeing the futility of relying solely on dams-and-levees, Congress in 1973 bolstered a latent national flood insurance program with incentives for local governments to qualify their residents for subsidized flood insurance provided the communities also zone lowlands to limit development from the most hazardous areas. Fast forward to the 2000s, and we’re promoting “natural solutions,” such as watershed management and floodplain reconnection. In spite of it all, damages continue to rise with greater losses occurring from continuing disasters.

A long list of sensible approaches have succeeded in denting the armor of this problem. The metro government of Nashville has sustained a floodplain management and relocation program for decades and succeeded in halting development on high hazard floodplains while helping 400 home owners voluntarily move to safer terrain. Charlotte, North Carolina, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, have similar initiatives. Lycoming County, Pennsylvania succeeded in getting all fifty-two of its local municipalities to enact floodplain zoning and launched a buy-out program that continues, helping people move to drier ground. Napa, California transformed a conventional proposal for higher levees to a plan that expanded acreage dedicated to flooding and that created new parklands along the river. The Susquehanna Greenway Partnership strives to protect recreational greenways along hundreds of miles of the East Coast’s largest waterway.

My personal engagement with flooding began at the height of the Hurricane Agnes Flood in Pennsylvania when I lived in the danger zone at ground-zero of that storm—one that caused unprecedented flooding across eight states. Working as a county planner back then, my job was to figure out what should be done differently to not just recover from the disaster but to avoid the next one. In the aftermath I saw how dams had failed to contain the flood crest, how levees had ruptured when we needed them the most, and how post-flood relief was costly, inadequate, and useless in coping with the floods of the future. There had to be a better way. I set out on a search to find that path, and then, fifty years later, to write a book about this fascinating story of nature, community, culture, economics, engineering, climate, crisis, and always of rivers.

American Rivers led the way toward better understanding back after the Great Flood of 1993, and a similar mission continues with the organization’s current floodplain restoration goal of “reconnecting 20,000 acres of floodplains to their rivers” during the next few years. Doing this will allow flood waters to spread out, benefiting freshwater ecosystems and reducing damage to homes, businesses, water lines, roads, and other infrastructure.

Rivers make the news when they saturate the homes where people live, but that’s the bad news. The good news is that floodplains can be protected for when rivers do overflow, and so that our streams can deliver the benefits that only high water can bring, all provided we are not living in the path of the greater floods to come.

Former American Rivers board member Tim Palmer is the author of Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution To Our Urgent Flooding Crisis, published by the University of California Press, 2024, and other books about river conservation. See www.timpalmer.org.