Some agricultural economists were calling the disaster the “billion-dollar flood.” But “we’re too busy right now dealing with it” to evaluate it, says John Verona of the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce in Rock Island. Volunteers and local disaster-relief workers desperately tried to hold back the water with sandbags. in the historic landmark town of Ste. Genevieve, Mo., National Guard troops built a bridge last week to transport traffic across flooded roads. At the weekend, Illinois, Iowa and Missouri became federal disaster areas, joining Wisconsin and Minnesota. In a radio address from Japan, Bill Clinton told flood victims they were not forgotten. Stateside, the vice president held a phone conference with Midwestern governors and announced plans to visit the devastated region this week.
Like other recent acts of God, the Midwest floods have reopened a debate about the human role in natural catastrophes. Though it seemed churlish at the time, there were relief experts who said that some victims of the 1989 San Francisco earth quake were flirting with disaster when they chose to live on the fault line. The same argument has been made about people who build on oceanfront property or landfills-or on the banks of the mighty Mississippi. “If you’re going to live near the river, you have to take precautions,” says hydraulic engineer William Koellner, chief of the water-control section of the Army Corps of Engineers in Rock Island, 111.
Yet the inevitable availability of federal assistance arguably saps the willingness of communities to prepare for disaster. Call it “the politics of compassion,” says Daniel Polsby, a law professor at Northwestern University. “This is the undermining of selfreliance, when you make a habit of using politics to solve problems that people previously solved themselves.” Although the federal government offers flood insurance unlike most private companies-only 20 percent of those eligible bother to buy policies. The Federal Management Emergency Agency (FEMA) will be making grants and loans to hard-hit flood areas.
Precisely. Aside from building at a safe distance, there are limits to what people can do to prevent flood damage. “The best way to control it is to control the source, but we cannot control rain,” says Ben Yen, professor of civil engineering at the University of Illinois. Levees can be broken. The vastness of the Mississippi makes diversion, another technique, impractical. During the Depression, the government built a system of locks and dams in an attempt to tame the upper Mississippi. But as it has periodically through the ages, the river has arisen once again to prove who’s boss.
