A quote from the article: "The Dutch, the Japanese, have a 10,000-year level of protection. Their attitude is let's do what we need to do to prevent a catastrophe. It requires a commitment to do something. It might be more than strengthening the levees. It might be large gates to prevent storm surge, like they have in the Netherlands. It might include, and it should include, restoration of the coastal ecosystem -- the wetlands that provide a buffer against storms."
A longer excerpt from this vitally important article.Will we ever learn?
By Stuart Leavenworth -- Bee Associate Editor Published 12:01 am PDT Sunday, July 2, 2006
With no rain in sight and temperatures topping 100 degrees, few people in Sacramento are thinking now about floods. And that's part of the problem.
Flooding becomes urgent and very real following catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina, but then the memories fade. Seasons change. Wet periods turn dry. Politicians and the media find fresh issues to exploit. Conditions that led to the flood disaster seem less urgent.
Retired Brig. Gen. Gerald E. Galloway has seen this pattern play out across the country for decades. A civil engineer who spent 38 years in the U.S. Army, Galloway probably knows as much about flooding -- and strategies to prevent flood damage -- as anyone in the United States. In 1993, he led a White House study into the causes and consequences of the Midwest floods. The resulting document, widely known as the "Galloway Report," recommended a number of measures that might have lessened the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina -- had Congress acted upon them.
Galloway has traveled to New Orleans several times since Katrina and is also familiar with the threat facing Sacramento and the Central Valley. Seeking his views on flood protection, I reached him at his office at the University of Maryland, where he is a Glenn L. Martin Institute professor of engineering.
Bee: Right after Katrina struck, you testified to Congress last year about the nation's flood threat, and you said: "It is amazing to me that the capital city of Sacramento is only protected to a 100-year level." Why is that so amazing?
Galloway: Well, a 100-year event refers to a flood that has a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any given year. Put another way, such a flood has a 1-in-4 chance of occurring in the 30-year life of a mortgage. Those are not very good odds, especially for people living in a city as large and important as Sacramento.
Also, 100-year flood protection works well in areas where the potential flooding would not be very deep. But in a Sacramento, it could be very deep. If you had a levee that failed, the results could be catastrophic.
Bee: You led a committee that issued a number of recommendations following the 1992 Mississippi River floods. Congress acted on some and not others. Looking back, what were some of the recommendations that, if acted upon, would have made a real difference for the nation and even for New Orleans?
Galloway: First, you need to provide to urban areas a high level of protection, in excess of a 500-year protection.
Second, we don't know where all the levees are in this country. We need to find out, have some kind of inventory, and we need to keep track of the maintenance that goes on and the condition of these levees. As we heard in the June 1 announcement by the Corps of Engineers, the system of flood control in New Orleans changed greatly over the 20 years or 25 years in which it was built. With more detailed analysis, you would have known about the problems we are now trying to correct.
There needs to be a better level of cooperation, and defined relationships, of all the people and agencies that deal with levees and flood structures. We don't have a document that spells out the responsibilities.
We saw that there were many seams of responsibility in New Orleans, and there are many seams in California.
Bee: As I recall, your report suggested several changes for the federal flood insurance program.
Galloway: It did. It said we really needed to get tough with people about flood insurance. If you lived behind a levee, you ought to have flood insurance. Requiring insurance behind levees notifies people that they are at risk. If people don't buy flood insurance, if they disregard the opportunity, they shouldn't get any federal assistance.
Bee: But Congress didn't want to change its requirements for who must buy mandatory insurance and who should buy it voluntarily.
Galloway: That is right. It became politically tough to make these decisions. The Clinton administration started to deal with them, but then as you recall, we had the Gingrich revolution. The House (of Representatives) changed hands. Committee leadership changed.
Bee: I assume the building industry and local governments were not wild about changing the insurance program.
Galloway: Well, there was no one standing in line saying, "Let's make the insurance program tougher." You see the same thing today. Congress is now considering requiring insurance behind levees in the 500-year floodplain. But as the time between the event and the action lengthens, the support fades. Developers step in and see these requirements as a hindrance to development.
Bee: Yet there have been some changes since the 1990s. I recall that after the Midwest floods, entire towns were relocated elsewhere.
Galloway: That was one of the positive impacts that resulted. Communities said they wanted to take a different approach to floods. All of Valmeyer, Ill., was moved. Altogether, about 28,000 to 30,000 homes have been voluntarily moved out of the floodplain, or just taken down with their owners moving elsewhere, since the 1993 flood.
The amazing part is, two years later there was heavy flooding in the Mississippi Valley, but there were no losses in these towns because the homes and businesses had been moved to safe ground.
Bee: You've been back to New Orleans since Katrina. What is your view of how that city can rebuild without putting people back into extremely unsafe areas?
Galloway: It has to start with the state and federal government making a commitment to some level of protection. Right now, we are simply restoring the levees to where they were and getting people back in the federal flood insurance program. It is amazing to me that we would consider that to be a reasonable level of protection.
The Dutch, the Japanese, have a 10,000-year level of protection. Their attitude is let's do what we need to do to prevent a catastrophe. It requires a commitment to do something. It might be more than strengthening the levees. It might be large gates to prevent storm surge, like they have in the Netherlands. It might include, and it should include, restoration of the coastal ecosystem -- the wetlands that provide a buffer against storms.
