Battling river likened to war
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Despite improvements, low-lying areas remain prone to flooding, Galloway said. “People want to live there, and as a result people have chosen to live there.”
Determining where to live based on past floods is a dangerous proposition, he said. “The half life of a memory of a flood is very short. In a few years people will say, ‘Well, it wasn’t so bad.’ “
Engineers need to do a better job of communicating flood risk to the public, he said. “People will say, ‘I didn’t buy flood insurance.’ Well, nobody promised you that nature would stick to a 100-year flood. The Mississippi River doesn’t understand the 100-year flood.”
The 2011 deluge appears likely to surpass the 1973 flood and will be second only to the flood of 1927, said John Barry, author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.
“It’s scary, frankly.”
Barry, who serves on a levee board in New Orleans, recalled the recent tsunami in Japan.
The standards the Japanese use are much higher than those of the United States, yet engineers there failed to build in redundancy with the nuclear plant, he said. “It was hubris. They thought they would never have a problem.”
In the U.S., the best flood protection system can be found on the lower Mississippi River, he said.
Thankfully these levees have been built in hopes of handling what the greatest storm might be, he said. “If we had built levees only for a 100-year flood, we’d have 20,000 square miles underwater.”
Corps officials expect more than a foot of water to top the Yazoo Backwater Levee, and they remain confident the levee will hold.
If it does hold, they say floodwaters in the lower Delta shouldn’t exceed about 95 feet above sea level. If the levee breaks, floodwaters could rise to 106 feet above sea level, spreading across much of the south Delta, they say.
They say their biggest fight will take place on the 4-mile stretch north of Vicksburg between US. 61 and the Mississippi River – the area between the Steele Bayou Structure (part of the Yazoo Backwater Levee) and the Main Line Levee.