Okay, so maybe no one is talking about levees; but it certainly isn't as though the midwest rivers aren't spouting off about and spouting over their pathetic capacity. For those of you who haven't studied the high tech design of a levee; or never envisioned the complexity of building an artificial berm to hold back the water of a river; just consider all those sandbags and realize that a levee is as simple as that; a mound of earth to hold back the river's waters. No wonder we refuse to build a secondary line to contain the flooding; and no wonder all these communities have failed to build their own secondary levees to restrain flood waters; that would be tantamount to admitting that the river floods! Better to keep that sort of thing hush hush; we don't need crazy people walking around spouting off ideas like that; it would just be un-American to build a second line of levees to contain flood waters; why, that would almost surely recognize the area inside the 2nd line ov levees as a floodplain; and wouldn't our maps then have to be corrected? What a headache!
The US Corps of Engineers who routinely ignore our levees are very well paid experts on sitting around neglecting all kinds of work. When they do get off their tush and do something, the price tag is astronomical. It isn't as though anyone could do simple measurements of water volume and determine where to place secondary levees; Nope, this would require decades of study, mammoth design budgets, with testing upon testing; it isn't so easy to get actual work out of this crew.
Yep, America is helpless to do anything about her rivers... and if you did build a flood line of levees; why then next you would obviously place something called a "water gate" at various positions along the original levee.... so you could respond to flood stages and route that water around communities... uhm Gee, maybe the reason we never dare speak about levees is because this would be so simple to do and would save so many more millions than it would cost to build.
So. 83% of Iowa is a disaster area due to flood waters; two candidates for the presidency are looking high and low for something intelligent to say about how the nation should address the matter; and what do we get? Any solutions? Does anyone mention the simple need for a secondary line of levees to manage flood stages? Or will the problem go away by talking it to death?
Yep, nothing stops flood waters like presidents... if you line up all the politicians in America in front of the next flood, I'd bet you that their first order of business upon returning to Washington would be to build a 2nd line of levees and install water gates. But that's probably the only way to get it done.
