For years the geologist at Washington University in St Louis has warned policymakers about building houses and businesses on flood plains, walling off rivers with dams, locks, dykes and levees, disregarding the consequences of global warming on weather patterns and the use of outdated statistics for calculating the risk of a major flood, reports the Economist. “The devil could not have come up with a better plot,” says Robert Criss, Cassandra of the Mississippi.
Missouri policymakers have largely ignored the warnings. After the Great Flood in 1993, the Galloway Report, written by a group of experts appointed by the White House, called for federal flood-insurance programmes to discourage development in flood plains. It said that taxpayers should stop bailing out areas that flood regularly. And it recommended that the basins of the Missouri and Mississippi should be managed as one watershed. Very little of this has happened. “This misery will repeat itself,” predicts Mr Criss.