Needed: A Dry Sense of Humor

As the product of spring thaws has pushed the Mississippi River to the breaking point, as the Army Corps of Engineers has elected to save the downstream cities and towns by literally opening up the floodgates and unleashing water flows on thousands and thousands of acres of rural farmland and small communities in Mississippi and Louisiana, all eyes are on the south central region of the United States. After all, “Floods kill more Americans than lightning, tornadoes or hurricanes in an average year, according to federal figures. And flash floods, usually associated with summer downpours, like the one that killed more than 140 people in Big Thompson Canyon in Colorado in 1976, can come as if from nowhere.” New York Times, May 21^st. But there is a dangerous stranger lurking in the Western states, from Montana to California.

Even as the Western United States faces long-term prospects for drought and urban water shortages, a record year of precipitation, particularly snowfall, now faces the spring and summer thaw. Little things like parts of the Colorado River that has 17 feet of snow piled up in certain portions of its adjacent watershed areas. Or that California’s Lake Tahoe area (pictured above) had a great ski season this year; parts of the region have 60 feet of snow piled up, waiting for the thaw. And as I have noted before (in connection with potential earthquakes), the Sacramento-San Joaquin Levee system, built to contain such runoff, is in dire need of repair, a system that includes antiquated mounds of dirt and stones, begun in 1850 and substantially completed in 1930.

“At Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River in Utah, federal managers have begun spilling water downstream in preparation for the rising waters; the reservoir has 700,000 acre-feet of available space, but will have an expected inflow of 1.4 million acre-feet more through July…” NY Times. The stories repeat, in Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, etc. Too much water for a parched land with insufficient capacity to capture the water flow in normal times, now waiting for a possible crush if weather patterns melt too soon and too fast. In some parts of the West, snowfall has continued to build up, even into May.

Should June be hot and unforgiving, the snow pack will melt fast, sending tons of water crashing through watershed communities below, ill-prepared for the runoff. Should the summer be mild, with warmer temperatures spread more evenly throughout the summer months, somehow, the water systems can be managed to avoid catastrophic flooding. For some in the West, the record melts offer an opportunity to make up for decades of losses in the water table: “Hydrologists… are cheering what they say will be a huge increase in water reservoir storage for tens of millions of people across the West. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, two huge dammed reservoirs on the Colorado River battered in recent years by drought, are projected to get 1.5 trillion gallons of new water between them from the mammoth melt.” NY Times.

The threat in the West comes from a combination of variables, from the “once-in-a-hundred-year” precipitation and general climate change to an economy that has deferred and ignored infrastructure repairs and upgrades in a sea of budgetary shortfalls and governmental deficits. As you may have guessed, nature doesn’t really care about governmental policies; she does what she does without much concern for damage or disruption. It is up to man to adjust to nature, not the reverse.

I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes – as history books report – mankind can simply be overwhelmed by nature.