Game of Floods - Foggy Hollow
Upstream Neighbor
Assignment: Read the role assignment and background reading below, then answer the questions at the end.
Role Assignment:
You live on Foggy Hollow River, a little way outside town and upstream from the Foggy Hollow neighborhood. You came to live there for the natural beauty of the area. You do not have a problem with flooding, and you would like to keep it that way! You are concerned that if the town builds a levee (wall) to protect Foggy Hollow, river water will back up during big storms and your own house could flood.
Background Reading:
Mississippi Levees: A Curse and a Blessing
Adapted from a story by Rebecca Hersher, May 21, 2018
Mike Stone, left, and Andy Sherman in the pumping station for Hannibal, Mo., during a flood in 1993. The city is protected by a flood wall, and flood managers have built up levees to protect against flooding. But scientists warn those structures are making flooding worse.
Floods on the Mississippi River are getting more frequent and more severe. But scientists warn that the infrastructure meant to protect towns and farms against flood waters is making the problem worse.
A series of analyses have helped confirm what engineers have posited for more than a century: that earthen levees built along the river protect some communities, but increase flood risk for others - especially those who live across from them – because they push the water elsewhere.
Nicholas Pinter, a geologist and the associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis, explains "What you're doing in many cases is taking a flood plain out there — it can be 5 [or] 6 miles wide — and you're forcing the water that would otherwise spread across that area to go through a narrow passageway." As the passageway gets narrower, the water flows faster and higher.
The resulting floods are more severe than they would have been without the levees, which then drives people to build more levees, and the cycle continues.
Levee hazards are not a new idea. In 1852 an engineer named Charles Ellet Jr. wrote a report for the federal government in which he warned that confining the Mississippi River to a narrow channel caused the water to "rise higher and flow faster."
But despite 19th century warnings, levees quickly became the go-to solution for controlling the river. After the great flood of 1927, Congress required the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a massive system of levees and dams on the Lower Mississippi.
'They're Sending the Water Our Way'
Residents of Pike County, Missouri know this only too well. They live across the river from an area known as the Sny Drainage District in Illinois, which has some of the tallest levees on the Mississippi River. The levees protect the people living in the Sny, but they increase flooding across the river in Pike County.
“They’re sending the water our way, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” says Al Murry, the emergency manager for Pike County. The county has been hit with multiple so-called 100 year floods in the last decade, destroying crops on Murry’s side of the river while the other side stayed dry.
Sny District levee construction.
“You know, every year you just spend enormous amounts of money. It makes a mess out of a lot of property, and a lot of crops are going to waste,” Murry says.
It’s true that life behind levees is less expensive. When levees are high enough to protect against floods with a one percent chance of happening in any given year, homeowners living behind them are no longer required to carry flood insurance.
Flooding in Pike County, Missouri.
Farmers behind the Sny levees are also paying half as much to insure fields along the Mississippi River as their neighbors across the river are, explains crop insurance salesman Matt Jones. "It's based on flood risk, and the area behind the levee is considered lower risk," he says.
But is the risk really lower? Some people who study the river say levees can also increase long-term flood risk for both farmers and homeowners, because they aren’t protected by insurance if the levee fails. "Just because you live behind a great, big, strong levee does not mean that there's no chance of getting flooded," explains geologist Nicholas Pinter. "There are two types of levees: those that have failed and those that will fail."
Mike Reed, the superintendent of the Sny district, defends his tall levees and says that they are safe. "In an excess of 100 years we've had one levee breach," he says. He doesn't agree with data that shows levees increase flood risk. "A model is a theory. What actually is happening, to me, is more important that what a theory says."
But across the river in Pike County, Al Murry disagrees. Murray thinks the Sny levees are an example of short-term thinking and poor risk assessment. "People are greedy. That's a lot of what's going on on this river right now. It's not good for anyone."
A sign in a field near Winfield, Mo., during a Mississippi River flood in 2008. The area suffered a similarly serious flood in 1993. The frequency of severity of flooding up and down the river have increased due to climate change and river control structures such as levees.
Questions:
1. How do levees on one side of the river increase flooding on the other side?
2. What are two benefits of levees for people living in the Sny drainage district?
3. Why did the Army Corps of Engineers withhold funding from the Sny district?
4. Answer this question in character as someone living upstream from Foggy Hollow (see the role description at the top). Do you support building a levee along Foggy Hollow Creek to protect Foggy Hollow from flooding? Explain your reasoning.
Once you have answered the above questions, move on to Part 2 here.
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