The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else

The weird thing about this point of view is that the US Army Corps of Engineers are lionized for their continued mismanagement of the War on Flowing Water (like all Wars the army fights, it loses this one too!) while private entities like Little River who have done a better job for a longer time are sneered at for their presumed lack of earthquake preparedness. (Why worry about excess rain it only comes once every couple of years; the earthquake that happens once a millennium should be the big worry!)

Blog post says more about the philosophy of blogger than about reality.

Are you sure about the "homes" part?

20 years ago, I was a professor at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. As part of new faculty orientation, we took a bus tour of the area. During the trip, we passed through the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway. We were told that no one was allowed to live there, so that it could be flooded on short notice without endangering people or their homes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15472082

According to the article, it sounds pretty bad. The city and county knew where the flood reservoirs were. The developers knew, there were "small notices on the plats" for these properties (which developers fought). Homewoner's never saw these plats and had no idea they were in a flood zone.

"In the end, over significant opposition from developers, the county agreed to put a one-sentence disclosure of possible “controlled inundation” for plots of land in neighborhoods inside Barker. But the sentence was buried in the plat documents, which are not typically shown to homebuyers."

They do for 100-year plains, just not 500-year. Are these requirements common elsewhere for 500-year? I am not sure, but I assume so since there is surprise that "for some reason Houston didn't require" it.

The folks outside of that pool, however, whose homes were only flooded because the Corp of Engineers decided to open the reservoir floodgates, have a reasonable claim for damages.

Their attorney is basing this claim on a violation of the 5th amendment, specifically relating to the state 'purposing private property for public use'.

However you can't have your cake and eat it too. Other regions have come up with regulations specifically because of the belief that a majority of the population benefits from them. The downside of regulation is cost and inconvenience—and a potential for corruption.

If a region decides against regulation then so be it. But then it incombs to its residents to plan their own contingencies (whether in the form of savings or insurance). The article's title is definitely on the click-bait side of the spectrum to cater to a narrative that the rich are overly bearing the burden of everyone else.

Banks require homeowners in flood plains with mortgages to maintain flood insurance. The problem is if you don't have a mortgage, you don't necessarily need insurance. However, perpetual Federal Government bailouts of homeowners creates moral hazard, and the expectation that Government will make you whole regardless of insurance, and thus bigger risks for all.

Not necessarily Houston. FEMA gets involved... if you're in a flood zone, FEMA mandates flood insurance (and so do the mortgage companies.)

http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2017/09/08/nashville-ma...

It's become a common tactic in public discourse to pretend as if issues are cleanly split between two coherent sides, with all action and words associated with the issue fully ascribable to one side or the other. But of course this is ridiculous, yahoos should get full credit for their yahoo ideas without it being necessary for anyone with even a vaguely similar position to denounce them.

>> People whose neighborhoods are likely to be flooded by such a decision should know years in advance that they are designated for it.

From the Article: "This land and many of the homes to the north and west of the dams are located in what’s known as the flood pool — the upstream portion of the reservoirs. [...] Many homeowners west of the Barker dam claim they didn’t know they were in a flood pool, that they hadn’t spotted the fine print on the bottom of some of their subdivision maps. (“Who looks at a subdivision map?” one resident asks.) The text of one such map reads, “This subdivision is adjacent to Barker Reservoir and is subject to extended controlled inundation under the management of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.” "

Sounds like they were told, but didn't care enough. Other parts of the article state that many lawyers are refusing to take a lot of these lawsuits b/c they were in regions that are marked for exactly this scenario.

Feel free to stop consuming oil. Even your Tesla has plastics made from oil and uses power generated using oil. If you buy a single thing made in China, you are buying products generally made using coal-fired electricity. Unless you live in a grass hut, you are part of the “problem.”

If we'd be talking paperclips vs paperclips would that be morally similar? Or is the monetary value of houses somehow large enough to justify a similarity to human lives?

What makes you think that any kind of property is worth as much as a human life?

I feel that the central thesis of your comment that the government is this faceless entity that has decided through force to violate lives and is thereby reprehensible to be something that's counter to the facts of the matter and the case at hand.

From the article, it quickly becomes clear that they were trying to avoid catastrophic failure by diverting water to a historic food plain;

> “If we don’t begin releasing now, the volume of uncontrolled water around the dams will be higher,” Colonel Lars Zetterstrom, the Corps’ Galveston district commander, was quoted as saying. “It’s going to be better to release the water through the gates directly into Buffalo Bayou.” The danger was that the water would flow uncontrolled into homes located upstream from the reservoir, crest the reservoir walls downstream, or crack a section of the Barker dam that was under repair. Had either dam failed, the Houston Chronicle later wrote, West Houston would have been left with “a week of corpses by the mile.”

In one cases, the failure would have been sudden and would have killed an unforeseeably large number of people. In another, they could act to preserve lives, but damage property that can be later rebuilt. They chose the latter, and I believe this was the most moral and correct response to the situation at hand.

Why aren't these people heroes for making this call? The Government in this case acted exactly as it should; as an entity that is meant to be representative of and beholden to its citizens and chose an action that preserved the lives of citizens over arbitrary property value that can be repaid through other means.

There is no version of this scenario that plays out well for anyone at all, but the fact that they minimized harm while reducing the risk of catastrophic failure shows that the system does work as intended. After all, homes can be rebuilt, but as far as I can tell, people can't be brought back from the dead.