“Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable.... Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.”
Alan Fram and Eileen Putnam
Associated Press
June 22, 2008
With so many natural disasters occurring simultaneously, it can be quite tempting to lump them into a single nightmarish disaster. If we are to survive the growing frequency and ferocity of killer storms in this age of global warming, we must resist the temptation to wallow in helplessness. Humanity can and will learn from the Mississippi River levee failures of 2008 and adapt our disaster planning models where possible.
So, was the horrendous flooding of 2008, which caused multiple Mississippi River levees to fail, all that different from what happened along the American Gulf Coast in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina? The answer is yes and no but we can learn from both.
Katrina was at the time the largest and fastest hurricane on record. While much blame justifiably was passed from one government agency to another, from a mechanical perspective, the sea swells which Katrina sent hurtling toward New Orleans and the rest of that section of coastline were quite high but not unimaginably so.
In short, if the mangroves and other natural windbreak structures which nature historically provided had been left in place instead of being destroyed deliberately for short-term financial gain, the damage would have been terrible but significantly less so than on that fateful summer’s day.
Global warming caused the waters of the Gulf of Mexico to be abnormally high, which provided fuel for an already powerful storm and ultimately, there was nothing anyone could do about it.
As for the upstream Mississippi River levee ruptures of 2008, particularly in Iowa, the similarities end with atmospheric fuel.
For more than a decade, climatologists have warned us that an overall pattern of destabilization would be one effect of global warming, that rainfall and wind patterns would shift. To that end, global warming most definitely was a prime cause of the Mississippi River levee ruptures.
By how much, though?
Well, here’s a little perspective for you. The torrential rains which struck the upper Mississippi River Valley in 2008 came in June, which is a very unusual occurrence in and of itself, but then also dropped significantly more rain than the region sees even during the most unseasonably heavy downpours.
In the end, the levees ruptured because the 2008 flooding resulted in peak flows which were 6 feet above the worst ever seen or predicted!
That is the type of change we will see with greater frequency in this age of global warming. That is the type of change which just a few weeks earlier caused massive flooding a few hundred miles away in Wisconsin Dells, where the flood waters were so strong and unrelenting that a lake wall imploded, an event virtually unheard of in the United States.
My friend, disaster planning models in this age of global warming must be reworked for huge swings in natural patterns – far outside our historical norms or imaginings. We have made this mess for ourselves and now we must try to live with it. Although, the 2008 Mississippi River levee disaster has shown us that unless we act quickly and decisively, many of our friends and neighbors won’t be able to live with it.
Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line
Corbett Kroehler
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