Speaking to the Lycoming County Planning Commission, author and environmental planner Tim Palmer emphasized the need for a more equitable and ecological approach to floodplain management.
Palmer, who has written a book on the subject, had worked for the county’s planning department for nine years in the 1970s.
“Floods happen,” Palmer said. “They’re just part of the way the earth works.”
“Unfortunately we have built and developed in the path of floods. Many cities, towns and neighborhoods are at risk from high water all over the United States,” he said.
“The result is really tragic and heartbreaking and urgent in many, many ways,” Palmer added.
Palmer’s slide presentation detailed some of the major flooding events beginning with the Johnstown Flood of 1889 which killed 2,200 people. That particular flood was caused by a dam failing upstream from Johnstown.
A flood in Pittsburgh in 1936 led to the federal government becoming involved in how to stop floods from happening, Palmer said.
“The whole approach was to build dams,” Palmer said, an approach which carried through the Depression Era.
Although the Army Corps of Engineers at that time tried to get people to move off flood plains in order to avoid the problem, Palmer stated, “that fell onto deaf ears.”
Although the government spent billions of dollars building dams, people still moved onto the flood plains, and damages continued to rise, Palmer said.
“This is because people kept moving on to the floodplains faster than the Army Corps was stopping the floods. It’s because of the false sense of security created below dams,” he said.
The floods keep getting bigger and with that the dams are filling with silt from the floods.
“If you plot out long enough, they’re all eventually going to be filled with silt and useless as flood control dams,” Palmer contended.
Dams were not the only measures taken to control floods. Levees were built not to stop the floods, but to contain them behind walls, Palmer said.
“Many of these are prone to breaching and breaking,” he pointed out.
The Army Corps has built 30,000 miles of levees, including the ones that protect Williamsport from flooding.
Another approach to flooding has been to pay victims to help them recover after a flood event.
“That of course is essential in any society,” Palmer said.
“The problem is that we do this over and over and over again. Now they have a Flood Insurance Program to help so it’s not just taxpayer money paying for it,” he said.
Mitigation efforts can also include reinforcing structures or elevating structures above expected flood levels, but these can result in other issues.
“We’ve not done a great job of stopping floods and keeping floods away from us and paying for damage, but now the floods are getting more intense. They’re getting more frequent. They’re getting more widespread because of a heating climate,” Palmer said.
One solution Palmer offered was, “restrict development on floodplains that are not yet developed.”
“There are other places to build and to develop,” he stressed, adding that 90% of the floodplain areas are not heavily developed.
“So, if we take measures now to protect them as open spaces, we’re going to avoid up to nine times as much damage as could theoretically occur in the future,” he said.
Another solution is buyouts of properties and relocation of property owners that have consistently experienced flooding which is something that the county has been and is doing.
“For every $1.30 that the federal government spends helping people to relocate and get away from the flood problem, we as taxpayers spend $100 paying them to stay where they are.
Another issue brought up following Palmer’s presentation was slides along creeks and roadways.
“If you look at Lycoming County right now, we’re also dealing with an epidemic of slides,” said Mark Murawski, who is on the Williamsport Area Transportation Study (WATS) Coordinating Committee.
“So flooding is not confined anymore to just the creeks, but it’s those steep slopes in many cases. Unfortunately we have a lot of roads that snake along those embankments and, every time one fails, we are now seeing an average cost of $3 to $5 million to fix that slide,” Murawski said.
“If you look at our entire transportation budget for a year, when we’re trying to take care of over 700 bridges and 2,000 miles of roads just in this county, we get $25 million a year in federal and local money,” he said.
“So when one slide comes down at $3 to $5 million a pop, we’re hitting almost a quarter of our entire budget,” he added.
Addressing Murawski’s comments, Palmer said there needs to be a different approach in general, “making decisions today that will give us a better future and not keep us on this path.”
“The slides are just another example of how the world’s changing under our feet, whether we want it to or not. To me, a big part of dealing with that is going to force us to recognize that nature is a fundamental force and we’re going to have to learn to deal better with it and to function in the limitation that it forces on us,” Palmer said.
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