Fifteen years after large swaths of the Upper Midwest were devastated by record setting floods, many of the regions levees are still not up to snuff. This despite the recommendations of a commission, set up by former President Clinton shortly after those floods, to establish a more uniform approach to managing rising waters along the Mississippi and its tributaries, including giving the principal responsibility for many of the levees to the Army Corps of Engineers.

The levee system in the region is still largely an unorganized conglomerate of levees owned and maintained by all sorts of towns, agencies, and even individuals. Many do not meet federal standards. Indeed, the commission report warned, “many levees are poorly sited and will fail again in the future.”

To add insult to injury, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina Congress passed a bill setting up a program to inventory and inspect levees, but it failed to provide enough money to carry that out.

Call for Change Ignored, Levees Remain Patchy (The New York Times 6/22/08)

June 24, 2008