Flooding and Memory

We have studied a lot of films about flooding and written about how memory quickly disappears about such events. The River(1937) warns about why future catastrophic events will occur unless the country takes action and uses examples of the incredibly destructive floods in earlier years to make its case. But even when the country did take action, our knowledge of these events is meager, and we always seem surprised when catastrophes occur. Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans is just one more example. The failures of levees and other flood containment structures led to the destruction of much of the city. Failures to maintain these structures were, in large part, the loss of memory , the ability to forget how destructive floods will be when they happen.

Now the great floods of 2011 have begun and Spring thaws are just starting to melt some of the largest snowpacks seen in the West and upper Mid West. Will the dams hold? What dams and where? This morning's St. Louis Post Dispatch has published an essay by policy expert Bernard Shanks. Shanks has studies the earthen dams of the upper Missouri for years and finds them disasters waiting to happen. These dams were built in the 1940's and 1950's and because of their flawed construction may not be able to withstand the enormous amounts of water being created this year. The failure of Fort Peck Dam, "built with a flawed design that suffered a well-known fate for this type of dam-liquefaction-in which saturated soil loses its stability,"might mean the loss of every similar dam down river. These dams are massive in scale. Some are three miles in length. The failure of one might mean flooding so massive that St. Louis might find itself underwater. These hydraulic dams have been outlawed in California, according to Shanks, and "no other large dams have been built this way since".

But who knows about these problems? Have they been forgotten or just seen as "500 year events"? Have we even begun to examine what would happen if all these earthen dams fail at once? Here is Shanks on this scenario: "It would probably wreck every bridge, highway,pipeline and power line and split the heartland of the nation, leaving a gap 1,500 miles wide. Countless sewage treatment plants, toxic waste sites and even Superfund sites would be flushed downstream. The death toll and blow to our economy would be ghastly."

Dams are not easily built, reconfigured or replaced. If it takes a disaster the scale of the great floods of 1927 to do it then we are all in for some "interesting times". The floods of 1927? Read John Barry's book Rising Tide to understand the national catastrophe of the 1927 floods. Maybe it will prepare us if the great dam failures of 2011 occur.