As Joan Didion reminds us in her book about growing up in Sacramento, Where I Was From; where we live floods regularly.
“Yet this river [the Sacramento] that had been from the beginning his ([her great-great-grandfather] destination has one regularly and predictably given, during all but the driest of those years before its flow was controlled or rearranged, to turning its valley into a shallow freshwater sea a hundred miles long and as wide as the distance between the coast ranges and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada: a pattern of flooding, the Army Corps of Engineers declared in 1927, more intense and intractable than that on any other American River system including the Mississippi.” (p. 20)
We live in an area nature has designed to flood on a regular basis and it is only through human will and engineering—someday read the story of how the Chinese built most of the levees—that we now are able to live here at all.
With that in our history, with New Orleans fresh in our minds, and with the moderate News Year’s storms and the immoderate sense of panic they caused, to remind us, perhaps it is finally time to begin thinking optimally about flood protection, rather than the just-enough-to-get-by approach characterizing recent public discussion.
Human engineering has created optimal levels of flood protection that can now take us beyond just being able to survive here, to actually being able to not really have to worry again about flooding.
Much of the discussion about Sacramento flooding talks about being able to predict the storms that will flood us to give us time to be evacuated, and affording the flood insurance we need to buy to cover our losses.
That is not optimal thinking.
I like this word optimal. My Oxford defines it thus: “Best, most favorable…an optimal decision comes as close as possible to achieving a given objective.”
As someone who lives in the floodplain I don’t want to evacuate and allow insurance to rebuild my home and vainly try to replace the irreplaceable contents of a lifetime.
I want to see optimal protection, coming as close as possible to achieving the given objective of providing my family and my fellow citizens and their families the highest level of safety and security in our homes, businesses and churches, that is possible, from the absolute certainty of flooding.
Optimal thinking is doing whatever we can do to ensure that there is no possibility of flooding, that should be our “given objective”, rather than being able to run away from the flooding while calling our insurance agent as he also runs away, which action should only be the absolute last resort.
Optimal thinking is what the Dutch apply to flooding, and we all know, or should know, they are the world’s experts on it, possessing the need and the will.
Here is what James R. Stoner Jr. said in an article in the Weekly Standard of September 26, 2005 Saving a Great City: Why America should rebuild New Orleans
"As the world now knows, not the river [Mississippi] but the lake [Pontchartrain] was the cause of the terrible flooding of New Orleans. The lake rose as the storm surged water in from the Gulf and added rains of its own, and it soon broke through a couple of levees….
"Lake Pontchartrain is geologically very similar to the Zuider Zee in the Netherlands. [where thousands died in flooding over the centuries] But the Zuider Zee has been tamed by human engineering. A 1918 act initiated the project after flooding two years before, and by 1932 a dam had been completed across its mouth. Some land behind the dam has been reclaimed in polders, some for dwelling, some for farming. What is essential is that the Zuider Zee has never flooded with waters from a North Sea storm since the project was completed, even in 1953 when a winter storm devastated Holland’s then-unprotected south. The replacement of individual dikes with a uniform dam and sea wall…effectively removed vulnerability from the Zuider Zee. A modern series of movable sea walls and dikes has since been built in the southern region, allowing continued tidal flow in fair weather but closable in foul. Modern engineering, with increasing sensitivity to the natural environment so far as is consistent with protecting human life, has restored to the “Low Countries” of Europe the kind of wealth they had known several years before.” (p. 23-24)
This is optimal thinking—the Dutch way—and is also the way in which we should be approaching our flood protection.
