Quit Trying to Beat Mother Nature

Musings

As humans, and particularly as Americans, we seem to have a penchant for believing that wherever there is a hill, mountain, river, lake or potential for a storm or earthquake or other natural phenomena we can somehow build and structure ourselves to overcome it. I like the positive attitude that reflects. If there is a problem let's work out a way to go solve it. However, there are a number of these natural phenomena of which their occurrences and history tell us it's a losing battle to try and overcome them. Therefore, why we keep banging our heads against the wall trying to prevail against every natural event is a mystery.

Thoughts

I understand that sometimes in the battle with Mother Nature we prevail. Occasionally we get a bridge or a levee that tames a river or allows us to cross it to some extent. Further we can build some buildings so that they can withstand limited earthquakes. We can also create large holding areas and levies that can withstand the great volumes of water from storms and the rising seas as the Dutch did in the early 1950s to avoid the future destruction of the floods from the North Sea. However, most of these efforts are not successful. They falter because it is too hard to know how to build to succeed at the maximum level Mother Nature can send at us and particularly because these are projects in which, if we are to prevail, large expenditures and lengthy lead times are required. In a political democracy there is rarely a willingness to allocate the amount of money needed for such a project and to allow the amount of time it will take. Such proposals usually waddle around in the legislature for many sessions and receive partial funding. The notion is always that if it requires further funding that can occur later. Mostly this is a case of acknowledging the problem but not being willing to undertake the effort needed to overcome the problem.

 An example is New Orleans. In Hurricane Katrina the area of the city called the lower 9th ward was flooded and wiped out. However, instead of simply not allowing rebuilding in the lower 9th ward the city proceeded with the notion that it would build better protective levees and allow rebuilding to occur back in the lower 9th ward. I expect we'll all see the time again when that area is flooded.

While we're on Hurricane Katrina let us recall that once it hit the politicians and experts all announced that no one could have predicted that strong of a hurricane would hit New Orleans that directly so there was no one to really blame. However, a hurricane of almost equal strength had passed just east of New Orleans a month earlier, I believe Ivan by name, and hence the city had at least that warning. Further, many studies that had looked at this issue in the prior decades had noted several times that New Orleans was seriously at risk. Further the Mississippi Delta was sinking below sea level and the area that absorbed much of a hurricane's strength as it

came onto the land mass was disappearing and therefore  successive hurricanes would hit with greater strength. It seems that someone must have been analyzing that information and been able to predict Katrina, but no one wanted to take on the issue. It was a clean it up later attitude. So it was suggested that no one could have predicted that failure and the failed political system remained unrepentant.

Further examples of the endless efforts to beat Mother Nature which never seem to work are the constant restorations of waterfronts where the currents have washed away the beaches. At most such locations those areas first try to get the government to pay for the Army Corps of Engineers or a private company to dredge up a bunch of sand from somewhere else and use it to restore the beach in front of them because it is so important for the tourist business and the economy of that particular area. Hence, we have innumerable beach restoration efforts constantly going on.

These were occurring with great vehemence along the Lake Michigan shoreline a couple years ago when the Great Lakes reached an all-time high in their water level. Since everyone that builds along the shoreline needs the best view possible many homes were very close to the water. Therefore, as the currents hit the sand bluffs, some homes crumpled down the bluffs. The neighbors all insisted that they needed sea walls very promptly to protect their very valuable property that was so important to their community. The fact that this is a natural reoccurrence and that it seems likely that most everyone that buys one of these houses must know that they are facing the possibility of water erosion does not seem to come into anyone's focus until the homes start to slide. Indeed, because of all of the protests raised by the homeowners, the State of Michigan began trying to approve sea walls on an expedited basis so that they could hurry up and be built before the further homes slid. In a number of locations those permits, and the permits required by the Corps of Engineers, were not even issued. The people just went ahead and built the sea walls and decided they would sort it out later. Perhaps someone got penalized for that but I do not know of any.

There was another recent episode of beach erosion at Salisbury Beach in Massachusetts. Here the homeowners got together and came up with $600,000 to restore their beach which had been eroded by the currents of the Atlantic Ocean. They had 15,000 tons of sand put on the beach to restore it. The sand was placed in mid-February of this year and by March half of it had once again eroded.

The ocean currents do not go away. If we place seawalls and restore beaches the currents will  keep coming. If the seawalls push the currents away they will just go further up the beach and erode that part of the beach at a more rapid rate. If we just put sand there we can count on the fact that it will be eroded and leave the beach destitute once more. Yet we keep restoring beaches with more sand because we don't want to admit that it is a losing battle. Having invested so much in the local residences or tourist facilities we can't face up to the fact that it is a losing battle. The ultimate lesson for this mentality is the ruins of ancient cities which can be explored off of  the coast of India and in the Mediterranean Sea and other locations which are now underwater.

Thoughts

I understand that when someone has a serious amount of money invested in a residence or in a business structure in a endangered location or along a beach they don't want to give up on it and they want to try and find all the ways to save it. However, I believe many of  these efforts have a  history of being long term failures. Therefore, they should only be funded by private funds and the permitting should be restrictive so that a new problem, such as forcing the current onto neighboring properties, does not occur. I understand that when you get into the legislatures and Congress the members are trying to make their constituents happy and so they trade support for projects and get money to do projects  such as beach restoration. They are bound to get some of these efforts approved in their horse trading legislative schemes. But when you're dealing with Mother Nature you have to be clear and upfront about what is going to happen and who should pay for it. The rest of the population should not pay for these projects which are just there to support the endangered property owners who are in harms way by choice!

Silence Dogood

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