Is it fair to flood the homes of rural folks to save city folks?

[Liberal_in_LA]

[Lars39]

1. From what I understand, they knew they lived in a flood plain,

receiving yearly letters to remind them. No good solution either way, and I sure wouldn't want to be the one to make the choice.:(

[FLPanhandle]

34. Technically, the people of New Orleans live in a flood plain too.

It's the only logical solution, but claiming that people knew they were in a flood plain can just as easily be applied to any riverfront city.

[Motown_Johnny]

2. Is it fair to allow a city to be flooded to save rural folk?

[Liberal_in_LA]

5. But if the city would have naturally been flooded without human intervention to re-direct flood

waters is it fair to re-direct that water to the homes of non-city people?

[AndyTiedye]

6. Actually No

The water would have flooded that farmland already without levees to stop it.

It is designated as a flood plain because it has always tended to flood.

[Liberal_in_LA]

7. I see

:-(

[former9thward]

14. Much of New Orleans is below sea level.

Given that it is located next to the Gulf of Mexico that is what I would call a floodplain.

[Curmudgeoness]

10. This is not exactly what the situation is. The whole area

along the Mississippi River has been changed by human intervention for a long time. There are levees all the way down that river. This situation is being caused by the opening of a spillway that was human intervention when it was built. The Mississippi has not been flowing naturally for years, and the places where there would be natural flooding are the places that will be flooded now. They were swamps and low-lying floodplain prior to the spillway.

There is nothing natural about the Mississippi River anymore.

[cstanleytech]

26. Isnt the rural area being flooded a natural floodplain already?

If so then it seems kind of silly imo not to use it and let a major city flood where it would impact on far more lives than a rural area where there are fewer people.

[elocs]

3. Is life fair? Yes, fairness is irrelevant. n/t

[Wounded Bear]

4. Hate to state the obvious.....

but I think it is a bit more complicated than that.

[Posteritatis]

13. Sad that that doesn't seem to be obvious to many anymore. (nt)

[Strelnikov_]

8. Been on the books for decades. Without Morganza/Enhanced Old River Control Str (post-73)

we would be saying goodbye to New Orleans in a week or so.

Maybe the local officials should not let people build in a floodway.

Also, without Morganza/ORCS this event would result in an avulsion/channel hijack of the Miss into the flowage. 700 kcfs for three weeks versus the Miss main channel now going through what was your corn field.

Lot of manufactured Sturm und Drang over something everyone knew was coming someday.

[Blue-Jay]

9. I've been to Cairo IL.

They're not what you'd call "city folks".

[Liberal_in_LA]

12. well, I assume they are more densely populated than the poor people about to be flooded

[Strelnikov_]

19. The "poor people" in the New Madrid floodway consisted mostly of big ag holdings

I am sure that there were some "poor people" flooded, but make no mistake, the MO politicians were involved because politically connected corporate agriculture was being impacted.

[FLAprogressive]

11. It isn't "fair" but it's what needs to be done. They know that they live in a floodplain.

[Obamanaut]

15. Sometimes in life one is the pigeon, other times the statue. nt

[SoCalDem]

16. What's inherently unfair is the fact that so many states in harm's way

have never fully addressed the need to have a special fund available to help people when these disasters occur. This is often done via TAXATION, and many states with high tax rates routinely have these funds.

Another issue is that so many states'- rights states have cast a blind eye to floodplains when it comes to issuing building permits, and they have put people in harm's way.

When people are allowed to/encouraged to build and invest their life's worth into a business or a home in a vulnerable area, it;s the ultimate fault of bureaucrats who allowed it to happen.

These states routinely ask for (and get) federal money to prop up their own failed vision and leadership, and in the end the people who can afford the losses the least, also get the least in after-disaster aid.:(

States that brag about how much they hate "big-gubbmint", and how proud they are for having no taxes or low taxes, are also telling their citizens that if they ever have a disaster, they are truly on their own or at the mercy of the feds to bail them out.

[Liberal_in_LA]

18. +10

You make good points here.

[Curmudgeoness]

21. I especially agree that building in these areas should not

have been encouraged. I go a step further and say that all the efforts to tame the Mississippi River and remove all the natural floodplains to make room for farms and homes was the biggest mistake made.

[Strelnikov_]

23. "states'- rights states have cast a blind eye to floodplains"

That is the main problem.

[Curmudgeoness]

17. Fairness is irrelevant. I thought of this same thing this morning

and my gut reaction was that it sucked that they were going to flood the poor farmers and rural people. But then I thought, what would I do if this was MY decision. A decision has to be made to do something, or nothing. This flooding will affect about 20,000 people. That sucks. But the numbers who will be flooded without this just leaves no other choice. I would have to open the spillway if it was my decision. I hate that we cannot save all of the land from flooding, but we aren't god yet. Unenviable decision.

[SoCalDem]

25. In the end, that's what spillways are for.

anyone living in the shadow of one, has to know that someday, it might have to be opened:(

[WatsonT]

20. I guess you'd flood whatever is worth the least of the two

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

22. Talk to God. He's the one in charge of natural events

As the water rises, one volunteer asks another, "What are you doing?"
"Praying for God to stop the flood."
"Well, keep praying while you fill sandbags!"

[backscatter712]

24. Fair? No. Lesser of two evils? Yes.

The alternative is to let cities get flooded, which could result in massive devastation like Katrina.

By opening the floodgates, mostly farmland gets flooded. Which sucks, and will harm the livelihoods of a lot of farmers, and yes, some houses will be flooded too, but the damage to structures is orders of magnitude less than if cities got flooded. As for the farmland, that's what insurance is for, and even so, the only thing to do is replant, and fix miscellaneous damage to roads, farm equipment, barns, etc.

[Igel]

27. Fairness is irrelevant.

Discussion of floodplains is beside the point. Both farms, rural communities, and massive metropolises like Cairo (population under 3k) are in the floodplain.

Stating that the area about to be flooded would have been flooded in any event is also pointless. Minus the levee system, much of that area *would not* have been flooded. Containing the flooding upstream channeled all the water quickly downstream, and is partly responsible for extent of flooding that will take place.

Government decides who will get flooded and who will be spared. This isn't based on just notions of economic importance: Cairo, run down and with high unemployment, was arguably worth less than the crops and farm infrastructure destroyed--except that odds are that most of the people in Cairo had no flood insurance while most of the farmers had some sort of insurance. It's not based on notions of equal rights--the Cajuns who'll be badly flooded are, in part, punished for being downstream of the people who got to have their land protected and thus are retroactively more important not because of any decision actually taken but because nobody wanted to take a decision that wasn't absolutely necessary. With the flooding that far downstream, there's no way to mitigate it, those decision points were all "upstream."

Fairness is irrelevant. The mix of political and other decisions foisted upon the ACoE and other decision-makers aren't based on fairness.

[applegrove]

28. They did the same thing with a Manitoba flood today. They broke the levy in a rural area to save

more homes somewhere else.

[Ex Lurker]

29. a few points (please read and consider)

1. this area would have flooded anyway. It was the hardest hit area of the 1927 flood. Opening the spillway will raise the level, but it hardly would have been high and dry.
2. It has been a designated flood area for nearly 60 years. The Corps of Engineers sends people living there a letter every year reminding them of that fact. I'm sorry it's come to this, but they knew the circumstances when they chose to live there.
3. It's not just city vs rural. Allow the MS to flood anywhere between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and you will wreck this country's fragile economy. The second largest oil refinery in the US is in Baton Rouge. If it floods, get ready for $8 a gallon gas. Most of the midwest's agricultural exports go through the Port of New Orleans. If the docks go under water and are shut down for weeks, farmers from Kansas to Minnesota start missing their mortgage payments. There are countless other examples.

It's a tragedy that these people are being flooded. Unfortunately, it's a tragic necessity. We should do everything we can to help them get back on their feet (perhaps somewhere besides a floodplain,) but opening the spillways had to be done.

[Liberal_in_LA]

33. Read and considered. Still feeling sorry for the folks impacted

[LatteLibertine]

30. I'm hearing if they did

nothing, New Orleans might flood worse than it did under Katrina.

I believe New Orleans city alone is about around 350K folks now.

Yes, it sucks and I suppose it does shake out to the lesser of two evils.

[tammywammy]

31. If you're warned every year that you live in a flood plain, you shouldn't be surprised when they use

it as a flood plain. :shrug:

[melm00se]

32. a flooding Mississippi

is both a positive and negative thing.

on the negative side of the ledger: people's homes and property get damaged or destroyed.

on the positive side: the farm land effected get an immediate boost as nutrient rich silt is laid down revitalizing the soil in a completely natural way.