Tear DOWN the levees ?
It's a fair question.
If water can't spread outwards, it goes UPWARDS.
Every time there's a flood, towns and counties add
height and width to their levees along the Mississippi
and its tributaries, essentiall channelizing the rivers.
The result - every time there's a big rain, the water
creates a massive 'wave', higher than the last one,
that travels down the channels until it overtops the
existing levees and FINDS someplace to spread out.
Instead of six inches of standing water for a day,
you get six FEET of water that stands for a week.
This is ridiculous. A cheap fix for a few badly-placed
cities grew out of control until it's the main CAUSE
of flooding problems over a 1000-mile swath.
So ... TEAR DOWN THE LEVEES (or almost all of them).
Time for a "Floodplain Restoration Program" along
these rivers. It's been done along other rivers,
and yes, you lose a LITTLE farmland to transient
marshes, but marshes are GOOD things all in all,
home to all kinds of endangered fuzzy-wuzzies.
It's a lot cheaper to compensate some farmers for
lost acreage than it is to pay them for totally
lost crops, or totally in****ated cities, time
after time after time.
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