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Sherwood's Soapbox

Red River, Katrina, and other soggy messes.

Itsy bitsy spider crawled up the water spout.
Down came the rain, and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain.
Itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again.

I don't get it. The news is full this week about the floods on the Red River in North Dakota and Manitoba. People are displaced. Homes are ruined.

You would think that people would learn from their mistakes.

The Red River floods with some regularity. I think there's been 4-5 national news worthy floods since I've been paying attention, about 30 years. I helped a friend pile sandbag on one of those.

Dikes in general aren't the answer. If you put dikes in, you just export the problem down stream, and make it a bit worse. Oh, they are fine for small towns, but not along mile after mile of river. After all, if the source of the water is also on your side of the dike, you have to have pumps to put it in the river. Water doesn't run up hill.

When rivers flood the flood plain acts as a temporary lake. The river becomes 50 miles wide and 6 feet deep. One extra foot on that can soak up a lot of water. It sits there for a week or two, and runs away, then you come back and clean up the mess.

For farmland that mess may not be too great. The water on the flood plain generally doesn't move very fast, so fences are still in place. We had a in '87 on the North Saskatchewan. In places it dropped a couple feet of silty clay, which doesn't grow good crops.

Since floods happen in spring, it may mean that you lose your planting season. Since silt may adversely affect the soil productivity, you may need to plant alfalfa or clover or a mix for a couple years. But the land is still there.

But the house the barn, the equipment. A new combine costs half a million dollars.

One of big problems with floods is that everyone has trouble at once. Sure you can repair the house. But the amount of repair work vastly exceeds the number of competent people to fix things. The result is very expensive work, often done by anyone who knows which end of a hammer hits the nail. We need to come up with methods for reducing the amount of repair work to be done, and reducing the urgency of what needs to be done.

Here's my solution: Shoot it down:

1. When reconstructing, farmers should build themselves an island. Moving dirt is fairly cheap when done on a big scale. And creating an island for each farm is cheaper than building a dike for all the flood plain. Easier on your downstream neighbors too. The height of the island is 4-5 feet above the highest known flood.

2. For farms that are in place, build a dike around the farm. A half mile of dike is a lot cheaper than a river of dike.

For individual buildings I can see merit in building on piles. Sure it would add a few tens of thousands of dollars to the price of a house.
This is peanuts compared to the cost of rebuilding after a flood. In the mean time, you have a place to park the car, a place for the kids to play on a rainy day. In essence you are building a sacrifical space that may or may not be closed in. Utilities cannot be on this floor. (The water heater, the furnace, the electrical panel are all on the main floor. Insurance policies are written in terms of excluding this part of the house from coverage. Government won't pay claims on this part of the house.

Downtown cores would automatically have a parking level under the store. Parking in cities is always a problem anyway. Pedestrian friendly cores would have the sidewalks on the building floor, not the street floor, with overpasses at intersections.

If the house floods anything left on the bottom floor is ruined by the water. Presumably you moved the car out of town earlier.) But the house is livable as soon as the water is gone, unlike Katrina where the people were homeless for a very long time.

This might start a new style of construction. We'd have tall skinny houses. Would mean we could have more yard space for the same size house. Think in terms of stand-alone brownstones.

Implementing this. I would suggest that any reconstruction be required to follow some damage prevention scheme to be eligable for emergency funding. It would be more expensive to fix, but it would save money in the long run.

For a large city it would be more expensive than proper flood control measures. But the large city dweller is at the mercy of the city planners. A solution like this, enforced by building codes so that people who wanted to build for permanance could do so. (If you are building a flood resitant house, then flood height +2 feet is added to any height restrictions. . .)

We don't have to be like the spider.

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Read, laugh, send me a line and tell me why each idea won't work. Convince me and I'll issue a retraction, and grant you a kudo for correcting my ignorance.

Send email to soapbox@sherwoods-forests.com

Note that, unless you tell me otherwise in your letter, I may publish it, or quote it in a future rant