No policy without a calamity.
—Dutch proverb
“God created the earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands,” the saying goes. Dutch farms, it turns out, were built up much the way the farms of the Sacramento Delta were, and man’s interventions in both places have had similar effects on the environment.
The Netherlands originally comprised a lowland of domed peat bogs that rose just above sea level. Around 1200, farmers began digging channels to drain the bogs to grow crops such as wheat. As the peat marshes were drained, lower water levels allowed oxygen to penetrate the soil, which promoted the growth of microbes that consumed organic detritus. The peat dried up and blew away. Thus the land began to sink, or “subside,” and emit carbon gas. As the land dropped, water levels rose, and the Dutch turned to increasingly aggressive drainage methods—sluices, dikes, and windmill-powered pumps—to protect their crops. This caused further subsidence, and a degenerative cycle was under way. Holland’s thousands of acres of oxygenated peat send millions of tons of carbon gas into the air, causing further global warming, which raises sea levels.
Today, much of the Netherlands—and two-thirds of the population—is almost twenty feet below sea level. Floods have long plagued the nation. Most notorious was the storm of February 1953, which collapsed numerous dikes, swamped 9 percent of Dutch farmland, killed 1,834 people, and caused millions of dollars’ worth of destruction. The calamity touched off a period of national soul-searching. Realizing that they suffered from poor storm prediction, badly engineered floodwalls, and miscommunication, the Dutch spent billions of dollars to create a world-class flood-control system. Unlike the United States in countless vulnerable areas such as New Orleans, Sacramento, or Texas City, the Netherlands have now armed themselves against a once-in-ten-thousand-year storm.
Just downstream from Rotterdam, the Maeslant Barrier is ready to shield Europe’s biggest port from the next megastorm. The barrier is made of two sets of triangular metal arms, each as long as the Eiffel Tower and twice as heavy, which hold floating gates that swing together to defend the nation from wind-driven waves. Completed in 1997, the barrier—one of the longest moving structures in the world—is a key piece in Holland’s $7.5 billion Delta Works, a network of dikes, dams, and locks that were designed to permanently end the floods. With protection from a once-in-ten-thousand-year storm, the Dutch are considered the master builders of flood defenses.
The Maeslant Barrier remained unused until November 2007, when a big storm whipped out of the northwest and pounded the Dutch coast with tall waves. In response, the Maeslant and other barriers, such as the Hartelkering and the Oosterscheldekering, were closed. The barriers worked flawlessly, and the nation was spared. But the Dutch realized that even these enormous storm gates would not be sufficient to hold back the rising seas that will result from a warming climate.
Considering its future risk, the Dutch asked, what is required to flood-proof the nation for two hundred years? A team of experts called the Delta Committee has suggested innovative solutions—abandoning some existing turf to the water; extending other parts of the coast as far as 2.5 miles out to sea; using parks as floodplains; building a new generation of flood barriers, dunes, dikes, and retention ponds; and designing floating houses. This stormproofing will cost about $1.5 billion a year for a hundred years, the Dutch estimate. And the nation is prepared to spend the money.
This is a key point. While Holland’s success “looks like science and engineering,” said Piet Dircke, a Dutch water management consultant, “the main lesson is funding.” Since the Middle Ages, the country has used elected bodies called water boards to levy taxes solely to fund flood defenses. Flood defenses require constant tending, and the Dutch water boards ensure that there is always enough money to “keep our feet dry.”
Inspired by the flood-protection systems of Holland, Bea and his colleagues are trying to pioneer a new approach to flood control. One aspect of this initiative is to change the way the Army Corps of Engineers operates. Some in the Corps remain skeptical of him, but Bea wants to put the animosity aside, gather all of the nation’s leading flood experts, including those from the Corps, and share technical notes. “That’s the only way we’re going to fix this damn thing,” he said. “And it is very broken.”
He concedes that the Corps has good levee designs on its books and has occasionally built successful flood-control systems. The Mississippi River and Tributaries Project (MRTP), for example, has proven largely effective at flood control, and Bea would like to see its integrated approach emulated elsewhere. The MRTP has four components: high, strongly built levees for containing floodwaters; floodways for diverting excess water past critical sections of the river; canal improvements and stabilization, to protect levees, increase the water-carrying capacity of the river, and provide efficient navigation; and tributary-basin improvements, which include the building of dams, reservoirs, pumps, and channels for drainage and flood control. It is a massive system: the “main stem” levees, flood-walls, and various control structures stretch 2,203 miles (some 1,606 miles along the river itself, and another 596 miles along the Arkansas and Red Rivers in the Atchafalaya Basin).
But Bea also believes that even more basic changes to the way America handles floods are required. While America has plenty of technology to control rising water in an environmentally sound way, the government has yet to use it wisely or broadly. We need new state and national organizations to address the infrastructure challenge. And we need to engage all concerned—commerce, government, and the public—to help the process. “We need a long-term vision for how to deal with water, which we’ve never had,” he said. “We need much better leadership, from the bottom of the local level to the top of the federal level.”
The United States will face more, and more intense, flooding this century. How should we react?
The nation can take some basic steps to control high water, eliminate dangerous levees, and curtail building in flood zones. First, Congress must rethink land- and water-use policy and connect them more closely. Second, the Army Corps of Engineers should be reinvigorated and given a mandate to build and maintain a coherent, robust, nationwide flood-protection system, as opposed to the ineffective, piecemeal measures that have tragically failed regularly. As part of this reinvention, the Corps must be held accountable. This means repealing the laws stemming from the 1928 Flood Control Act that immunize the Corps from prosecution when its levees fail. Third, citizens and businesses that benefit from levees, which is most of the nation, should apply their resources to their construction and upkeep and work hand in hand with the Corps. Fourth, by integrating nature and technology, building only in areas that can adequately be protected, and allowing some wetlands to return to their naturally absorbent and unconstrained state, bioengineered flood defense will provide effective protection.
Most fundamentally, the nation needs to rethink how it accommodates the environment. For years, Americans have relied on “hard” engineering—dredging, bulldozing, and building ever-taller walls—to control floods. But water is an irresistible force, and these efforts are eventually doomed to fail. Instead of trying to beat nature into submission with hard engineering, the Corps should develop a greener and more intelligent system of flood defenses that integrates traditional engineering with natural storm defenses, such as barrier islands, wetlands, and reeds. Such a “soft” approach to flood control is costly to build and maintain at first, but over the long term, it is more effective and cheaper than the hard engineering approach.
The commitment has to be well funded and sustained for at least a hundred years. “That’s the way the Dutch think: work with nature, and think very long term,” Bea observes. “They’ve been doing this since the thirteenth century. We have a lot to learn from them—if we’re willing to listen.”
As Congress dithers, and the Corps refuses to listen to outside advice, some people have built innovative solutions on their own.
One day I stepped aboard the Tule Queen II, a forty-foot-long aluminum catamaran captained by Jeff Hart, to see how he has developed a soft-engineering approach to restoring Sacramento Delta levees that could be a model for other projects. Hart is a tall, bearded, fifty-eight-year-old Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist and the son of a Sacramento River farmer. He runs Hart Restoration, a nursery that sells “California-friendly” plants, which require minimal maintenance, are drought tolerant, and are beneficial to wildlife and insects.
“It is to nobody’s advantage to let the levees go,” he said. “It could lead to ecological and economic disaster for California.”
Hart lives next to a levee, in Steamboat Slough, and sees the Delta levees being tested every day. Some stressors are natural, such as river flow, tidal action, or flooding. Some stressors are man-made, such as boat wake, tree cutting, and roads built on top of levees. Most of the Delta levees were not carefully engineered but were built informally by farmers and laborers. Some were built on top of natural silt deposits—narrow, sometimes infirm spits of land that were enhanced with piles of sand, dirt, and rocks during 150 years of reclamation. Maintaining this fragile “coalition” of materials is a constant, expensive challenge.
Sensitive to criticism that poor maintenance contributed to the breach of the Delta’s Jones Tract in 2004, and New Orleans’ levees during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the state of California and the Corps have been “armoring” Delta levees against erosion by dumping boatloads of rock along the levee walls. But the rock is expensive, costing about $8,000 to $10,000 per linear acre-foot, Hart said, and while it looks imposing, it is ultimately only a stopgap.
Furthermore, the Corps has threatened to remove vegetation along hundreds of miles of levees in the Delta (and across the nation), believing that plants weaken the earthen berms. Classically trained “engineers abhor nature,” Hart said. “To them, plants are the enemy. They argue that the roots go all the way through a levee and weaken it. That’s not true for all plants. You don’t want really big trees growing out of your levee, but we have found that layers of different kinds of soil with a little bit of vegetation on top makes a levee much stronger” than the Corps’s rock armor.
Hart and Bea don’t know each other, but they have arrived at the same conclusion: the integration of traditional engineering—such as levees and floodwalls—and natural defenses, such as reeds, will help restore the Delta and provide effective storm defenses.
Since 1977, Hart has been using plants such as tule—a tall marsh plant, with long, grasslike leaves, pale brown flowers, and strong roots—to revive wetlands, reduce erosion, and buffer embankments around Delta sloughs. Hart’s primary “bioengineering” tool is the “brush box,” a series of fences made of vertical stakes filled in with horizontal piles of brush that are planted along the sides of channels to break wave action. Planting tule between the brush boxes and levee walls traps sediment, protects fish, and further strengthens levees and embankments.
With government and private funding, Hart has established hundreds of yards of brush boxes in the Delta, which he believes reduce wave energy by 60 to 80 percent; when tule is added, the wave impact is reduced to nearly zero. The bioengineered approach, Hart said, is “far more effective and costs about one-hundredth the price in certain situations,” of the Corps’s hard-engineered piles of stone.
The larger message of such initiatives is that it is not enough to simply reengineer our water infrastructure; we must reengineer the way people think about water and our relationship to it. As the Dutch have shown, the way man interacts with the environment must change as conditions change. And in the twenty-first century the pace of change is increasing.
In places such as the flooded Midwest or the suddenly dry Southeast, where people have had a foretaste of our hydrological future, a vigorous dialogue about man and water has sprung up, technical innovation is on the rise, and cooperation over shared resources is being promoted. Yet more people are using more water than ever, in new ways, and H2O is increasingly the focus of conflict. Tension is growing over privatization, and among thirsty resources such as agriculture, power, fuel, and minerals. Frustrations over the growing demand for water and limited supply is boiling up across the country, from hot, dense cities in Florida to chilly, remote villages in the Alaskan tundra.