Faulty Flood Walls Spring Problems

  • Donna Smrdel stands in her backyard by the "flood wall." (Photo by Julie Grant)

Many people are drawn to live near rivers, lakes and other bodies of water. That means they have to take special care in case of floods, but flood walls and levees don’t always protect them. In one town, residents are asking why the wall separating their backyards from the neighboring river didn’t hold back the water. The GLRC’s Julie Grant reports on the safety of floodwalls and building in a floodplain:

Transcript

Many people are drawn to live near rivers, lakes and other bodies of water. That means
they have to take special care in case of floods, but flood walls and levees don’t always
protect them. In one town, residents are asking why the wall separating their backyards
from the neighboring river didn’t hold back the water. The GLRC’s Julie Grant reports on
the safety of floodwalls and building in a floodplain:


Dale and Donna Smrdel bought a condominium along a river just a few months ago.
This summer they’ve been sitting in the backyard on a wall overlooking the river and
watching the sunset. But now, that concrete wall is broken and falling away from the
bank. It’s crumbled in some spots and held together only by twisted rebar.


“This is where the largest portion simply fell away because of the water. It was a torrent.
It was so strong it picked up a camper and flung it over this wall. Because the water was
so high above the wall, that it was like a toy. It just floated away like a toy.”


People on rafts rescued everyone from
second floor windows. Donna Smrdel says they thought this wall would protect them
from flooding:


“I don’t think there was a single person here that believed this was not going to keep us
safe. I think we all believed that even if the water did rise that it wouldn’t hurt the
retaining wall. None of us are engineers. We looked at it, it looked safe. We believed
we were safe. We had no idea, we just had no idea.”


This story is not uncommon. Last year, people in New Orleans expected a flood wall to
protect them from rising waters brought on by Hurricane Katrina. People along the
Mississippi River expected levees and flood walls to protect them from the Great Flood
of ’93. Many flood walls hold, but when they don’t, the people who thought they were
protected quickly find out they’re victims. In the case of the Smrdels, it turns out that
wall wasn’t even meant to protect them from high water.


Painesville City Manager Rita McMahon says the Smrdels live near the exit of the river,
where ice often jams in spring:


“Well, that wall was built by the private property owner as actually a flood protection
from ice dams. It wasn’t intended to protect the property from this type of a flood. This
was a volume flood that came from the south to the north. It was just a wall of water, so
to speak.”


The Smrdel’s condo community was built in the 100-year floodplain 30 years ago. Back
then, there weren’t regulations on building in a flood-prone area. Today, new buildings
have to be elevated.


That’s better protection then a wall, but flood walls and levee protection give people a
sense of security. Often they don’t think about that protection failing them, and the
consequences of what that failure will mean to their homes and families. Engineers say it
is possible to live safely by the water, but homeowners have to do their own investigating
to find out the safety of housing elevations and flood walls. We spoke with Carm
Marranka, a structural engineer with the US Army Corps of Engineers:


Julie: “When you look at Katrina, when you look at the Mississippi floods in ’93, and when we
look up here, do you think that sometimes flood walls, even those built by the Army Corps,
provide a false sense of security?”


Marranka: “I don’t know if it’s a false sense of security. I think
with the design and assumptions that I’m familiar with the factors of safety, those
structures are built at. And good maintenance, I think that’s a big issue. They have to be
maintained. They cannot be allowed to fall into disrepair.”


When the Army Corps builds a flood wall, Marranka says it’s usually up to the local
community to maintain it, but the local governments often don’t have enough money to
pay for that maintenance. Donna Smrdel doesn’t trust any of it anymore:


“I mean, even if they bulldozed it, what kind of retaining wall will they build next? If
this didn’t work, and we all believed it would work, what do you build next?”


All those other people flooded out of their homes will also have to decide whether they
trust flood prevention technology, and if living by the beautiful scenery is worth the
threat of floods.


For the GLRC, I’m Julie Grant.

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Building for Disasters

  • People rarely build a house with tornadoes in mind. Some think that developers and homeowners should be more aware of potential natural disasters. (Photo courtesy of the NOAA)

There’s a whole category of disasters people think will probably never happen to them. Major floods, landslides, and earthquakes happen sometimes decades or centuries apart. So, people don’t think about them or they ignore the risks. And, some experts say, that’s why we build or buy houses
in places that really aren’t safe. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Melissa Ingells reports:

Transcript

There’s a whole category of disasters people think will probably never happen to them. Major floods, landslides, and earthquakes happen sometimes decades or centuries apart. So, people don’t think about them or they ignore the risks. And, some experts say, that’s why we build or buy houses in places that really aren’t safe. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Melissa Ingells reports:


Disasters happen. It’s only a matter of when. The problem is, we prepare for things like tornadoes that happen every year, but we aren’t prepared for a major flood that might only happen once a century. Donald Hyndman is with the Department of Geology at the University of Montana. He’s an expert on disasters.


“People just do not understand the scale of events, they also don’t understand that if in their lifetime there hasn’t been a really major event, that there won’t be a really major event.”


So Hyndman has co-written a new textbook on disasters. He says there’s a lot of pressure to build houses in places that are hazardous. Maybe it’s just a great view, so people build there despite warnings. Or, they think they can stop the ground from moving with retaining walls, or think they can stop floods using levees. Donald Hyndman says that even well built projects just can’t stand the power of nature.


“There is increasing pressure to build in the same lowlands, the same flood plain areas, and the developers say, well, the Army Corps of Engineers has built a major levee or dyke here, that protects people on these floodplains. The problem is, levees break and they always break.”


Donald Hyndman’s co-author is his son, David Hyndman, a geologist from Michigan State University. David Hyndman, says even when a place is a known area for disasters, demand for housing means buildings go up all over again in the same spot.


“There’s always development pressure, and the developers even fairly soon after large floods like some that occurred in California, they keep pushing and the public has forgotten what has occurred and then often the development will be allowed, which causes a disaster afterwards.”


Donald and David Hyndman both say developers don’t help the situation when they build in dangerous areas.


But folks in the housing business say there are plenty of laws to warn potential homeowners, before a house is even built. Lynn Egbert is the CEO of the Michigan Association of Homebuilders. He says that people often ignore the regulations because they want to live where they want to live.


“Consumer desire – consumer interest and desire is the primary reason, even though there are state regulations and federal regulations to put people on notice and protect against the risk for insurance, to locate where they want to locate, which is a property right.”


Egbert says that real estate people and lenders are supposed to let property owners know of the risks. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes people don’t know to ask. And sometimes people think that despite the risks, a disaster just won’t happen to them. Donald Hyndman says we don’t respect how powerful the earth really is.


“Basically, some people feel that they can control nature, or improve on nature, and I’ve actually heard some politicians say we can improve on nature. We can not only not affect the results, those results are typically – they typically backfire. So we really cannot control nature.”


The Hyndmans are hoping their new textbook will help build awareness of all kinds of disasters—but especially the ones that could happen right in our own backyard.


For the GLRC, I’m Melissa Ingells.

Related Links

Living Out Aldo Leopold’s Legacy

  • Aldo Leopold found fame by writing "A Sand County Almanac"... but even sixty years after his death, scholars say his theories about living in harmony with nature are influencing conservation practices today. (Photo courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation Archives)

If you feel you just cannot live without wild things, you have something in common with a conservationist who’s still influencing conservation practices almost sixty years after his death. Scholars say the theories of Aldo Leopold continue to help shape wildlife management and land preservation, especially in the Upper Midwest. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

If you feel you just cannot live without wild things, you have something in
common with a conservationist who’s still influencing conservation practices almost
sixty years after his death. Scholars say the theories of Aldo Leopold continue to help shape wildlife management and land preservation, especially in the Upper Midwest. The Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:


Aldo Leopold is probably best known for writing A Sand
County Almanac. That’s a collection of essays about finding harmony
with nature. His ideas about preservation changed while working for the
Forest
Service in the southwestern U.S. Rick Stel of the Aldo Leopold
Foundation
says one day in the early 1900’s Leopold shot a wolf thought to be a threat
to
cattle. The female had pups with her.


“And he says he got there in time to see the
fierce green fire die in her eyes… and it was at this time he realized
we’re going about this in the wrong way… we really need to look at all
creatures and everything as a community.”


Leopold’s epiphany led to writings that won him national attention. he
eventually moved to Madison, Wisconsin – first to work in forest
research and later at the University of Wisconsin. There, he taught the
nation’s
first course in game management.


In 1935, he bought an abandoned farm in the sandy floodplain of the
Wisconsin River. It became the inspiration for many of the essays in A Sand County
Almanac.


(sound of unlocking door)


Most tours of the site start at an old chicken coop that was the only
building left when Leopold bought the place and is the only structure
now. The shack, as Leopold called it, has no electricity or furnace.


(sound of fire)


On chilly days tour guides light a fire in the fireplace and talk about
the ideas Leopold developed while visiting the shack with his family.
The Leopold Foundation’s Buddy Huffaker says Leopold worried about
becoming disconnected from nature.


“His February essay talks about the two spiritual dangers of
not owning a farm. One is to assume food comes from a grocery store, and the second is that heat comes from a furnace.”


Outside the shack Leopold and his family worked to return the land to its
pre-agricultural state. They planted thousands of pine trees. The also undertook
one of
the first prairie restorations. The Leopold family spent a lot of time
discussing how
people were damaging the environment.


(sound of brushing)


About one hundred yards from the shack Buddy Huffaker brushes off
a plaque that’s set in the ground. at this spot, Leopold sawed apart a
lightning-damaged oak tree that he called the good oak. He wrote
about the experience in a famous essay that Huffaker says is really
about natural history.


“As he and his family saw through the growth rings of the oak, he
goes back in time to see how people have disregarded other natural
elements in the landscape – the decimation of turkeys and other
species that we hunted into extinction locally or entirely.”


But turkeys, sandhill cranes and a few others species have come
back–in part because of Leopold’s conservation ethic. Now his
followers are trying to protect more things.


To spread Leopold’s message some groups have started sponsoring
readings of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. At a library in Lake
Geneva
Wisconsin Jim Celano reads from the essay about the good oak.


“Now our saw bites into the 1920’s the Babbittian
decade when everything grew bigger and better in heedlessness and
arrogance – until 1929 when stock markets crumpled. If the oak heard them
fall, its
wood gives no sign.”


Celano is a former commerical real estate developer who now heads
a land conservancy group. He says he’s trying to convey Leopold’s
ideas to other developers.


“That we’re not here to say no to development… but to ask
they be sensitive to what they’re developing. And when you step on
their parcel, after their development is done, that the first thing you
notice is what they’re preserved and protected.”


(sound of woodpecker and traffic)


But even Aldo Leopold’s famous land around the shack is not immune
from modern threats. As a woodpecker hammers overhead, the noise
from a nearby interstate highway intrudes into the scenery. The
Leopold foundation’s Buddy Huffaker says Aldo Leopold knew the future
would bring new threats to the natural world.


“But I think that’s Leopold’s challenge to us. He
understood progress was going to continue. He just wanted us to
contemplate what we wanted that progress to be. And how far it
should go.”


And with sales of A Sand County Almanac bigger now than when it was
published in 1949, it ‘s a future Aldo Leopold might be helping to
shape.


For the GLRC, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Related Links

How Far Will Dow Chemical Cleanup Go?

For years, a big chemical company has been negotiating
with government officials on cleaning up an area contaminated with dioxin. Environmentalists say Dow Chemical has used its power and influence to drag out the talks. The chemical company has agreed to plan for some kind of clean-up… but it’s still not clear how far that clean-up will go. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rick Pluta reports:

Transcript

For years, a big chemical company has been negotiating
with government officials on cleaning up an area contaminated
with dioxin. Environmentalists say Dow Chemical has used its
power and influence to drag out the talks. The chemical company
has agreed to plan for some kind of clean-up… but it’s still
not clear how far that clean-up will go. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Rick Pluta reports:


Dow Chemical is a huge employer in Michigan, it employs almost 60 thousand people, not including outside suppliers. In a state that has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs, a big company like Dow is important. The state of Michigan has been negotiating with Dow for nearly a decade over cleaning up dioxin downstream from the company’s big plant in the central part of the state. Just recently Dow and the state struck a deal on the next phase of coming up with a clean-up plan. But it’s not clear how long it will take to design the plan and it’s not clear exactly how far the plan will go to clean up the contamination.


The people who live in the floodplain of the Titabawassee River, downstream from the Dow Chemical plant in Midland, Michigan, say they’ve waited long enough for a cleanup plan. Almost a decade has passed since dioxin was first discovered in the river sediment.


(sound of river)


At Immerman Park in the town of Freeland, downriver from Dow, signs dot the riverbank. They warn parents to keep their children from playing here, because there’s dioxin in the soil.


(sound of hand-washing)


An earlier agreement with the state led Dow to put handwashing stations up here for children to clean up after playing in the dirt. Mary Whitney lives nearby. She says the sinks and faucets in the hand-washing stations are too high and too complicated for children to use, and they’re located too far from the banks of the river. She doesn’t think the kids are getting the dioxin contamination off their hands let alone off their shoes and clothes. She says it’s typical of how the dioxin question’s being handled in Michigan.


“It’s like, well, let’s do a little bit to show we’re doing something, but let’s not maybe address the whole issue. We’ll do just a little but to keep the peace and to keep everybody from not getting so much up in arms. But I think, they’re trying to do, Dow is, trying to do some things to help. But it’s just putting a little Band-Aid on the whole issue. It’s not fixing the main problem.”


For decades one of the by-products of the chemicals Dow produced was dioxin. It’s believed dioxin has been in the soil around Midland since the early 20th century. The fact that dioxin contaminated the sediment along the river downstream was only discovered within the last decade.


Studies have linked dioxin to health problems, including cancer and damage to the nervous system. The state says dioxin has spread to the environment round the Titabawassee River to the point that it issued warnings to hunters to limit how much wild game they eat from the area. That’s because the state says deer, squirrels and other game might be contaminated with dioxin.


Dow and its supporters say the risks posed by dioxin are being overstated. Dow officials say there’s no evidence that the dioxin levels in the Titabawassee floodplain pose a threat to the public health. Dow researcher Jim Collins says the company has six decades of research on employees who’ve been exposed to high levels of dioxin, and the worst health effect is a mild form of chloracne in some of the company’s employees.


Chloracne is the skin condition that disfigured Ukraine’s president, Victor Yushchenko, after he was poisoned by a large dose of dioxin.


“We’ve studied heart disease, diabetes, immunologic effects, reproductive effects, and cancer. And other than some increased risk of chloracne in these workers, we find no health effects that have been related to dioxin exposures.”


Backers of the company say critics should be careful about calling for penalizing Dow. Janee Valesquez is the the local economic development group “Midland Tomorrow.” She says Dow’s impact on the local economy amounts to almost a billion dollars a year.


“So Dow is absolutely… an anchor for mid-Michigan.”


Businesses and workers don’t want to damage relations with the chemical giant. Jim Ballard is an economist at Michigan State University. He says there is some risk that Dow could abandon Michigan. Texas is the new home of the chemical industry, he says, because energy’s cheap and it doesn’t burden industry with a lot of environmental regulations.


“I think Dow might consider leaving if they felt the business regulatory climate in Michigan was excessively onerous. On the hand, it would be very costly for them to leave. They’ve got a large investment in infrastructure and human capital in the Midland area, and to reverse would be a decision that I’m sure they would not take lightly.”


But critics of how the dioxing clean-up has been handled think the economic concerns should not be more important than the health risks to people who live nearby – people such as Mary Whitney. She and others filed a lawsuit seeking a lifetime of medical tests paid for by Dow. That case is before the state Supreme Court. Whitney says she’s afraid a cleanup plan will get bogged down in talks, or delayed by studies.


“We want them to clean it up. Take responsibility for what they’ve done and clean it up and make it safe for all of us. Now I’m not sure what all that would entail. Surely maybe dredging the river to make it deeper. Shoring up the shores, so it doesn’t flood any longer. And fill in the yards with clean soil. And that’s going to be a big thing to do.”


Many critics of the state’s handling of the dioxin clean-up believe anything less than an extensive clean-up is putting business and jobs ahead of the health of the people in Midland and downstream along the Titabawassee River.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Rick Pluta.

Related Links

Dams Make Major Floods Worse?

  • The Army Corps of Engineers installed these wing dams to force the current to the middle. The rushing water scours the bottom of the channel to keep navigation open. A new study alleges the wing dams slow the current during major floods and cause flood waters to be higher. Photo by Lester Graham.

A recent study concludes that some actions of the Army Corps of Engineers might be causing more, rather than less damage during major floods on rivers in the Midwest. The study by two Washington University professors found that wing dams, which jut out into the river, could cause big floods to rise even higher. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham takes a closer look at this study:

Transcript

A recent study concludes that some actions of the Army Corps of Engineers might be causing more, rather than less damage during major floods on rivers in the Midwest. The study by two Washington University professors found that wing dams which jut out into the river could cause big floods to rise even higher. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham takes a closer look at this study:

The Mississippi and the Missouri rivers are two of the major arteries for barge transportation in America. Millions of tons of grain, and raw materials are floated up and down the rivers each year. It’s the Army Corps of Engineers’ job to keep the rivers open to barge traffic. The Corps has been doing that job for the past 150 years. But since the 1930’s that effort has taken on immense proportions. Huge dams hold back the river, keeping the water high enough for the barges to travel up and down-stream. Big earthen dikes, called levees, wall in the rivers, keeping them from flooding farms and towns, but also keeping the water from reaching the natural flood plain. Robert Criss and Everett Shock studied flood levels and the effects of the Corps of Engineers projects. Criss says those dams and levees alone might be enough to disrupt the flow of the river and cause flood stages to be higher.

“But the other component is these structures called wing-dams which are jetties of rocks that project out perpendicularly into the channel. For high-flow conditions, these act something like scale in a pipe. They impede the flow, restricting the channel. That slows the velocity of the water down and that also makes the flood stages higher.”

The purpose of wing dams is to force the current to the middle of the river to scour out the navigation channel to keep it open for the barges. Researcher Everett Shock.

“So, they do the job they’re intended to do. It seems that there’s an unintended–perhaps unintended consequence of all these constructions along the river that shows up when we have a big flood and makes it to –on the basis of our study– makes these big floods worse.”

Criss and Shock say their study finds that since these flood control projects have been erected, there have been more big floods, such as the one in 1993 that flooded the Mississippi and some of its tributaries for most of the summer. Robert Criss.

“The fact is, before World War II, a flood stage of 38-feet is very rare and now it happens every five years.”

But not everyone agrees with the methodology used by the researchers. The
Corps of Engineers dismisses the researchers’ study, saying they used flawed data. Corps officials point to a study at the University of Missouri – Rolla. That study compared the 19th century method of measuring a river’s flow by timing how fast floats moved in the current to the methods used today. Dave Busse is a scientist with the Army Corps of Engineers. He says the original stream flow measurements –the ones Criss and Shock used— were inaccurate.

“The flows were over-estimated by 30-percent using this float measurements rather than the measurements than we use today.”

Criss and Shock are skeptical of new numbers that the Corps prefers. Saying it seems awfully convenient for the Corps because changing the numbers makes the historic floods look smaller and therefore makes the 1993 flood look unprecedented. Criss and Shock say based on the original records, there was as much water in past floods as in the 1993 flood but lower water levels. Criss and Shock say the difference between then and now is that the Corps’ big dams, levees, and wing dams constrict the river’s flow and make floods higher.

The Corps, however, has other criticisms of the Criss and Shock study. Dave Busse says the researchers ignored the role of the Corps’ reservoirs in the rivers’ watersheds. Busse says the reservoirs hold back water that would otherwise be part of a flood. And Busse says, another flaw is the researchers conclusions about wing dams. The Corps says the wing dams force water to deepen the channel and increases the flow of the river.

“So, what we have is the same –it’s a re-shaped river, but its carrying capacity is actually higher now. We can actually carry more water at the same stage. The river got deeper, therefore this conclusion that they’ve made is wrong.”

The Corps says there’s more to managing the river than the researchers have considered. Criss and Schock, meanwhile, say their study is not the first to be dismissed by the Corps of Engineers. They say other studies have found similar results, but the Corps dismissed them as well.

Environmentalists have been arguing for decades that levees and dams keep floodwaters from spreading out on their natural flood plains and cause higher flood levels. The Criss and Shock study adds to their arsenal of arguments to change the way the rivers are managed. But most environmentalists concede that we’ve become somewhat dependent on the Corps flood control projects. Chad Smith is with the environmental group,
American Rivers.

“In most ways both of these camps are right. The Corps is right that putting some of the structure in has helped to reduce the kind of annual flood events that always happen on a big river like this, but what they unfortunately have done is to exacerbate what happens when you have bigger floods and the wing dams and the levees and the dams themselves all are part of that.”

The Army Corps of Engineers says it’s reviewing its way of managing rivers in light of the 1993 flood. But they also note that while flood stages might be higher more often than they were in the 19th century, most of the time those floodwaters remain behind the floodwalls and levees, protecting the communities from high water, and the Corps says in the end, that’s the only fact that really matters.