William S. Becker - The Creeks Will Rise: People Co-Existing with Floods

A DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING A FEW YEARS AGO, scientists from thirteen federal agencies issued the latest of their quadrennial reports on how global climate change is affecting the United States. The Trump administration hoped the report would get little attention on a holiday weekend. Instead, the obvious attempt to bury it made the report even more newsworthy, and it received wide coverage.

However, one climate impact in particular has yet to receive the attention it deserves. The lives of tens of millions of Americans depend on aging and inadequate flood-control structures on our rivers and coasts. Few were built to handle the record rains and unprecedented storm surges we are experiencing today. In fact, they were not even built to handle the range in climate variability weve seen in the past five hundred years. They are a national disaster waiting to happen, and the risk grows greater with each passing year.

There are at least 30,000 miles of recorded levees and more than 91,000 dams in the United States. Many were built to protect crops, store water, or provide recreation. Many others are meant to protect people and property. The typical flood-control dam was built to be reliable for fifty years, but when the American Society of Civil Engineers issued the most recent of its periodic report cards on Americas infrastructure, it found that the average dam is approaching sixty. About 15,600 of these structures are classified as likely to result in fatalities if they fail. Failure is more likely and more deadly as the dams get older, the weather gets more severe, and more people move into floodplains thinking they are protected.

Climate change produces floods that exceed the capacities of old dams and test whether their age has made them unable to do their jobs. There are no precise data on how many dams have failed, but we know of 173 failures and 587 near failures between January 2005 and June 2013. As Bill Becker points out in this book, nearly 140 million people live within reach of floods along the nations 3.5 million miles of rivers and 95,000 miles of shoreline. Engineers estimate it would take $115 billion to repair the dams and levees whose failures could cost lives. The experts warn that these structures are inherently risky.

So, we face a tough decision. Will we spend the money to repair flood-control infrastructure and upgrade it to handle the much larger floods and storms that climate change produces? Or is there a better way? Bill argues that there is.

He traces the long history of the nations attempt to subdue rivers and waves and explains why a toxic mix of special interests and greed has increased rather than decreased the risks of death and destruction from floods in America. Then he describes the deepest lesson of floods: We must change our relationship with nature and stop treating it like an enemy we can control and defeat. Instead, we have a great deal to gain by collaborating with it. In fact, the quality of our lives, and even our survival, depend on it. With greater urgency than ever, we must achieve what our most important environmental law calls the conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony. There is no other sustainable way to meet the real needs of this and future generations.