They did it, the river levels at Cairo, IL dropped a foot, but they may come right back up.
I have a bunch of mixed feelings about this. First off, as noted in the Times' story, flooding over 200 square miles of Missouri farm land may not have helped worth a damn. A lot of people's economic lives were ruined by blowing open the levee.
Second, the choice between Cairo and the farm land was a false choice. Cairo is a dying town and it has been dying for decades. The crime rate is roughly three times the national average. Only one business has opened there in the last five years or so and it went under in a few months. Some of the decline is due to good old-fashioned bigotry, but the population is not even a fifth of what it was at its peak ninety years ago. Detroit's and Cleveland's populations would have to fall by more than 50% in order to mirror Cairo's decline.
Cairo is a town on the way to extinction. It probably would not have been a completely bad thing if the current flood had put a coup de grâce into Cairo.
On the other side of the coin, one of the reasons why farmland along the Mississippi River is so productive is because the periodic flooding and silting renewed the land, or it did until the levees were built. The land will come back. The farmers who made their livings from that farmland may not be able to wait that long.
On balance, I'd have to submit that saving Cairo was probably the wrong thing to do.
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Wednesday, May 4, 2011
4 comments:
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One thing that should be clear is that THE AREA FLOODED IS A FEDERALLY-DESIGNATED SPILLWAY. Homes built in the flooded area were built ILLEGALLY. According to the easements signed by landowners when they were compensated for the eminent domain seizure of spillway rights, only agricultural uses were permissible. The levees "blown" were in fact the designated entry and exit points for the spillway, and were specifically designed to be blown that way.
ReplyDeleteThe same BS is going to happen when the Morganza spillway is activated when these floodwaters reach Louisiana, where hundreds of homes have similarly been illegally built in a Federally designated spillway.
The core legal problem here is that the Federal government did not seize the land itself but, rather, seized the spillway rights and compensated the landowners for the difference between what the land would be worth if fully protected from flood, and what the land is worth if occasionally flooded. The spillway deed restriction has been passed down to subsequent landowners ever since, but the landowners arrogantly assumed that the spillway option in their deed restriction wasn't ever going to be exercised because, well, it'd never been exercised in the past. Well guess what, people. It's there in your deed, and if you didn't know it when you bought property inside a spillway, it's your own damned fault because, as with the Morganza spillway, everybody in the area damn well knows it's a spillway, and it's right there in the paperwork you signed when you bought the property.
So it goes...
- Badtux the Louisiana Penguin
(who is quite familiar with flood spillways, thank you very much).
The official U.S. Corps of Engineers page on the Birds Point - New Madrid Floodway. BTW, the floodway not only protects Cairo, but also protects the agricultural land and towns on the *other* side of the Mississippi.
ReplyDeleteIn short, the floodway is operating as designed under the parameters specified when it was originally created after the 1927 flood and modified in 1965. The fact that it's never been operated since originally constructed doesn't mean it *shouldn't* be operated if flooding reaches that specified in its design parameters... and people who bought land inside the floodway, well. They knew it was a floodway. It was right there on their deed. They took their chances. Oh well.
Bravo, Tux.
ReplyDeleteOn the agricultural discussion forums I read, the attitude is shrug, and wait for the federal crop-insurance checks. We don't need to worry about the farmers.
I still think that the wrong choice was made.
ReplyDelete