Another good reason for protecting the health of natural flood plains is the high cost of flooding. The New York Times reports that when the Army Corps of Engineers declared last year that the levees in certain places, like East St. Louis, Ill. were ‘unacceptable,’ the rating kicked up a storm of protest along the broad Mississippi River flood plain.
Local officials and residents said the corps had raised its safety standards to unreasonable levels, overstated the risks, and heaped millions of dollars of unnecessarily expensive repair and insurance costs on the community. The Corps said it had not changed its standards. Instead, improved technologies for assessing risks help engineers get a more accurate picture of the condition of the soil supporting the levees.
Under more stringent inspections, the corps has declared 10 percent of the levees in a new database of 2,200 federal levee systems ‘unacceptable,’ including those protecting people in Dallas, Sacramento, St. Paul and Tulsa, Okla. About 80 percent are rated ‘minimally acceptable.’ Just 9 percent of the levees in the database have been declared ‘acceptable’.
