Clinton administration ignored 1993 flood report

NY Times:

The levees along the Mississippi River offer a patchwork of unpredictable protections. Some are tall and earthen, others aging and sandy, and many along its tributaries uncataloged by federal officials.

The levees are owned and maintained by all sorts of towns, agencies, even individual farmers, making the work in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri last week of gaming the flood — calculating where water levels would exceed the capacity of the protective walls — especially agonizing.

After the last devastating flood in the Midwest 15 years ago, a committee of experts commissioned by the Clinton administration issued a 272-page report that recommended a more uniform approach to managing rising waters along the Mississippi and its tributaries, including giving the principal responsibility for many of the levees to the Army Corps of Engineers.

But the committee chairman, Gerald E. Galloway Jr., a former brigadier general with the Corps of Engineers, said in an interview that few broad changes were made once the floodwaters of 1993 receded and were forgotten.

“We told them there were going to be more floods like this,” said Dr. Galloway, now an engineering professor at the University of Maryland. “Everybody likes to go out and shake hands on the levee now and offer sandbags, but that’s not helpful. This shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

While the committee’s recommendations certainly would not have prevented the Mississippi and its tributaries from rising to catastrophic levels, Dr. Galloway said they could have lessened the sense of helplessness and limited some of the damage.

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Maybe. You don't have to be a civil engineer to predict that the Mississippi occasionally floods. All it takes is a casual reading of history along the river. Some even think the flooding is healthy for the soil although no one thinks it is healthy for homes and communities. One of the reasons given for Louisiana losing its coastline is that levees are preventing the flooding that has built the Mississippi basin.

Do you think the headline writer at the Times has an election year agenda?

Call for Change Ignored, Levees Remain Patchy

That does seem to fit one of the candidates themes. But in 1993 Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency, but the change they were focused on was taking over the health care industry.