A recent letter to the editor in the Bee opined that our plague of wildfires was caused by a certain pissed-off deity. (Said deity, the letter writer posited, was likely registering his objection to same-sex marriage.) I, being a mere mortal, do not have the inside scoop on what might be eating the deity, but methinks it could be something else.
So, using the “sinners in the hands of an angry god” hypothesis, I set about looking for a message from the wrathful one. First, California’s got its drought on and we’re all supposed to be taking shorter showers and flushing infrequently. Second, because it’s so dry, half the state is ablaze. Third, the wild salmon fishery had to be shut down this year because of a steep population decline, largely because of loss of their river habitats. All sounds sort of water-related, if you ask me.
Maybe s/he’s pissed off because we’ve managed to put so many of our rivers in a chokehold.
An article in Salon.com today talks about the floods in the midwest. In the article, “A deluge waiting to happen,” reporter Katharine Mieszkowski writes that the catastrophic flooding was the result of “more than 100 years of narrowing and constricting the river.”
Although much of the blame is placed squarely at the feet of the Army Corps of Engineers for placing navigation structures in the river’s path, levees receive their share, too. Some of her article will sound eerily familiar to us’n here in Sactown, particularly the following paragraphs:
Levees, which are essentially piles of mud, dirt, clay and gravel, permit farming and development on the historical flood plain, yet greatly narrow the river’s course. “Where levees are added to the flood plain, they take away the capacity of the flood plain to both store and take away water,” says Pinter. Revetments, which line the river banks with boulders and concrete, prevent the river from meandering, which protects valuable land on the flood plain and makes the river straighter for shipping.
Now that the river can’t naturally spread out on its flood plain or meander, the extra water under flooding conditions has nowhere to go. “If floodwaters can’t spread out as they would in a natural flood plain environment, they can only go up,” explains Criss.
(Emphasis added. Note: The quoted individuals “Pinter” and “Criss” are, respectively, Nicholas Pinter, a geologist from the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and geology prof Robert Criss from Washington University of St. Louis.)
It may seem like cognitive dissonance to talk about flooding disasters while we have Arnie declaring a drought and 1,000+ wildfires raging all over the north and central state, but it’s not. Although the front pages are taken up by our other natural disasters, we can’t afford to ignore what’s happening here in Sac. How many catastrophic floods will it take before we stop building in the floodplain? Does one have to hit here, at great cost to our lives and economy, before we get it? Isn’t it enough that we have the “there but for the grace” moment to watch the destruction in New Orleans and the midwest?
I won’t give away the final quote in the article (just go read it), but let’s just say it’s applicable.
Anyway, if there is a deity, and if s/he is pissed off, my research concludes that it’s probably not about same-sex marriage.
See a related post about Sacramento’s flood issues.
