As of this writing, at least 110 people are dead with 161 missing as a result of the July 4 catastrophic flooding of the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, Texas. Next door in New Mexico, three people (including two children) were killed on July 8 after a 20-foot wall of water moved through their town of Ruidoso.
Appearing on Fox News Channel on July 7, Republican policy adviser Karl Rove blamed the large number of deaths on the lack of flood warning alarms on the Guadalupe River. On the same day, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick vowed to use state dollars to have an alarm system installed. The problem is that the Guadalupe’s waters rose 26 feet in 45 minutes between 4 AM and 6 AM on July 4. River sirens—in addition to useless warnings from the National Weather Service—don’t have a prayer of preventing hundreds to thousands of future deaths because the real root of the problem is not being addressed.
How did millions of Americans—despite almost a century of government anti-flood efforts—come to live, work, and even recklessly build Christian girls’ camps in potentially dangerous flood-prone areas?
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
Destructive flooding—from Illinois to Louisiana—occurred between April and May 1927. Enter progressive Republican and then-US Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover. Hoover launched a relief campaign that greatly increased the power of the US Army Corps of Engineers to implement supposed flood protection throughout the US. The campaign was followed by the Flood Control Act of 1928.
While the act led to the construction along the Mississippi River of one of the most impressive systems of levees in the world at the time, the great irony is that the new system certainly did not control flooding. While the new levees prevented flooding in some areas, they quickened the current of the river, which led to flooding in other areas. Other unintended consequences were environmental damage from reductions in some of the natural soil deposits along the river and an altering of the natural flow of water into the river’s flood plains.
Less than a decade later, the Great New England Flood of 1936 affected states from Maine to New York. Driven by a two-week deluge of water, it helped drive the passage of the National Flood Control Act of 1936. This act—much more than the one of 1928—spurred a massive boost in centralization.
Besides doubling the size of the federal flood-control program, it moved Congress away from regarding floods as principally a local matter and providing relief to only the hardest-hit areas. It effectively enlisted the federal government and Army Corps of Engineers in the battle against floods anywhere and everywhere. According to the New England Historical Society, the Army Corps built “hundreds of miles of levees, flood walls and channel improvements. The Corps dammed approximately 375 new major reservoirs.”
The Army Corps of Engineers and Tennessee Valley Authority (1937-1953)
For the rest of the 1930s and 1940s, private insurance markets never left infancy because the Corps built hundred-year flood walls which reduced risk just enough to make private flood insurance for homeowners too costly. On the other hand, private insurers, adjusters, and actuaries assessed the Corps walls as substantially inadequate protection which did not reduce risk enough. Regardless, an impasse was created for private markets that was both figuratively and literally cemented in place by the Corps.
Enter the New Deal central planners of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1953. (The TVA was founded in 1933, at least in part to control flooding around the Tennessee River.) TVA began monitoring flood-prone areas in and around about 150 towns and cities in its jurisdiction. At first, TVA used a worst-case standard from the Corps, regardless of whether such a flood had ever actually occurred.
TVA’s initial strict standard was quickly abandoned when it was realized that it would eliminate large areas of potential development that not only local private and public planners wanted, but TVA as well since part of its contradictory mission was spurring agricultural and industrial development. Thus, TVA switched to a new development-friendly standard based on past floods that occurred inside a 60- or 100-mile zone from proposed development.
Outside TVA’s jurisdiction, the US Geological Survey and Army Corps mapped floodplains with roughly the same backward-looking standard. By the end of the 1960s, all three agencies had laid the groundwork for a national map of floodplains. A flawed and dangerous standard had been set.
Hey, Hey, LBJ. How Many Floods Did You Cause Today?
Of course, no architecture of lethal policy would be complete without a contribution from Lyndon Baines Johnson, thus the Southeast Hurricane Disaster Relief Act of 1965. This act authorized $500 million in spending to assist in repairing damage created by Hurricane Betsy. The $500 million was a massive amount of money in 1965 that only encouraged more risky development.
Next came the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, which created the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which covered up to $250,000 in damage to single-family houses and buildings in cities and towns meeting the flawed federal flood-plain criteria. The absolute death knell for any semblance of economic and actuarial soundness in the NFIP came in 1973 when Congress allowed coverage to be extended to property owners who should have enrolled in the program and paid premiums for insurance but did not.
Epilogue
None of this is to insinuate that had there been more competition among standards that no one’s residence or workplace would ever have flooded or there would be no flood fatalities anywhere. However, there’s no doubt that the federal government’s perverse subsidization of residential, commercial, and agricultural development in flood-prone areas, as well as artificially cheap flood insurance completely detached from risk assessment, have contributed to not only the untold loss of lives over decades but billions of dollars of property as well. Private policies, which have grown relative to the NFIP in recent years, are not available in many flood-prone areas and are still too stunted in many other ways.
Lives will continue to be lost in Kerr County, Texas if Texas’s political leadership and citizens believe river alarms will assure safety from flood waters that can rise dozens of feet in minutes in the middle of the night. To paraphrase James Carville’s most famous quip, “It’s the proximity, stupid!”
The widespread laissez-faire perspective in late-nineteenth-to-early-twentieth-century America was that everyone should enjoy the country’s pristine rivers, lakes, and oceans to their heart’s content, but be cautious during certain seasons and get far away when storm clouds gathered. And, if you were “dad-gum fool” enough to consistently live close to an ocean or river or dam, you were taking an acknowledged risk and no one owed you or your family anything if you lost a bet with Mother Nature, the forces of which no man can or will ever match. It was a fully adult country back then.
