History Repeats: The Great Flood of 1993

By Robert Roy Britt

The area around St. Louis, Missouri, in August 1991 and 1993. The 1993 image was captured slightly after the peak water levels in this part of the Mississippi River. Flood waters had started to recede, but remained well above normal. This false-color image was created by combining infrared, near infrared, and green wavelengths of light observed by the Landsat 5 satellite. Credit: NASA

This month's flooding in the Midwest is reminiscent of the Great Flood of 1993, weather officials now say. But while a repeat of 1993 can't be ruled out, they say, this year is unlikely to match that colossal disaster.

Several of the 1993 records have already been broken this year and flooding is forecasted to last for weeks more. Preliminary estimates put damage into the billions of dollars with overall storm deaths put at 24 since late May.

But barring unexpected summer rains, National Weather Service officials do not expect a repeat of the incredible intensity and duration of the tremendous flood 15 years ago.

Regardless, history is repeating itself as some residents who moved into the floodplain since 1993, with assurances from FEMA and other officials that they would be safe, have seen their towns submerged this month, creating personal financial disasters for people who in many cases have no flood insurance.

Looking back

Few disasters in U.S. history match the devastation of 1993, when hundreds of levees along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers failed, killing 50 people and causing more than $15 billion in damage.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the 1993 flood was its duration. From May through September, major flooding occurred across North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Illinois.

Some 50,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. And 75 towns were "totally and completely under flood waters," according to an account by Lee W. Larson, Chief of the Hydrologic Research Laboratory at NOAA's National Weather Service.

"It was certainly the largest and most significant flood event ever to occur in the United States," Larson said.

There were plenty of lessons to learn.

Levees inadequate

According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, water overtopped or damaged 40 of 229 federal levees and 1,043 of 1,347 non-federal levees.

Among the other monumental effects in 1993:

• Barge traffic on both mighty rivers halted for almost 2 months.
• Bridges were out or not accessible on the Mississippi River from Davenport, Iowa to St. Louis, Missouri.
• Ten commercial airports were flooded.
• All railroad traffic in the Midwest was halted.
• The 1993 and 1994 harvests were lost.
• Numerous sewage treatment plants were destroyed.

The 1993 flood was not entirely unexpected. NOAA hydrologists had warned that a wet fall in 1992 and normal or above normal snowpack in the central United States meant flooding could be serious when things began to thaw in 1993.

"I think everyone was ready for some short-term heavy rain and serious flooding, but nobody thought it would last all summer," recalled Kenneth D. King, chief of hydrologic services at the NOAA National Weather Service Central Region Headquarters in Kansas City, Mo.

Nonstop rain

The rains were unrelenting.

In a five-month stretch starting April 1, 1993, nearly 48 inches fell in east-central Iowa, where an average of 33 inches of precipitation normally falls in an entire year.

By mid-June, soil throughout the entire region was saturated, so additional rains brought heavy runoff. In many locations within the nine-state area hardest hit by the flooding, it rained for 20 or more days in July; normally it rains eight or nine days during that month.

An unusual climate setup fueled the rains. A high pressure system known as the Bermuda High, which typically sits out in the Atlantic Ocean during summer and steers hurricanes toward the United States, was stronger than normal and moved farther to the north and west. This created a dam of air that stopped storms in their tracks over the Midwest, preventing them from sliding to the East Coast as they normally would.

The Missouri River crested at a record 48.9 feet at Kansas City on July 27, 1993. This water joined the already full Mississippi River and pushed the Mississippi to a record crest of 49.47 feet at St. Louis in Aug. 1.

Some locations on the Mississippi River were in continuous flood for six months.

Lessons learned?

One might assume some lessons had been learned. In fact, the NOAA administrator at the time, Dr. James (Jim) Baker, assumed so, too:

"Although the Great Flood of 1993 has caused devastating human, environmental and economic impacts, the lessons learned will guide us in providing improved services and benefits to the nation in the future," Baker wrote then.

But 15 years later, more homes than ever exist in the Midwest floodplains, and few projects to improve levees have been undertaken.

As an example of lessons not learned, the town of Gulfport, Illinois was inundated by 10 feet of water this month when a levee failed. That levee had been deemed safe by local officials and FEMA. Only 28 of the town's 750 residents had flood insurance, the Associated Press reports.

As Gerald Galloway, a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland, put it a few months after Hurricane Katrina: "The half-life of the memory of a flood is very short.”

Repeat of 1993?

Already, several 1993 records have fallen.

"Major and record flooding continues at numerous points from Iowa to Missouri," according to NOAA. So far 31 levees have been overtopped or breached on the Mississippi between southern Iowa and St. Louis, with additional levees threatened through the weekend, the agency said in a statement. The breached levees actually reduce flooding downstream, officials note.

The Mississippi is not expected to rise above 40 feet this week at St. Louis. That's nearly 10 feet lower than in 1993.

Rivers across Iowa are generally falling, while record and major flooding continues on several rivers in Wisconsin, NOAA states.

Preliminary indications are that new records have been set at 21 National Weather Service river forecast locations on tributaries to Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.

Flooding will continue for weeks, forecasters say.

"If we compare 1993 and 2008 for the same time periods — through mid-June — we cannot rule out 2008 flooding could become comparable to 1993 if we have similar storms during the summer of 2008," the agency stated.

Bright future

The summer outlook appears sunny, however:

"As the upcoming weather pattern is expected to change and favor drier weather for the central plains in mid-late June, the chance of repeating 1993 appears to be low at this time," NOAA states. "The critical unknown elements are the pattern of future rainfall ... and the timing and frequency of any future rainfall."

Predicting the future is of course tricky. And it's liable to get trickier.

Last week, NOAA released a report detailing how the agency expects global warming to affect the United States. The bottom line: "Droughts, heavy downpours, excessive heat, and intense hurricanes are likely to become more commonplace."

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Years Later, Climatologist Renews His Call for Action

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

James E. Hansen, a NASA climate expert, used a pair of cardboard dice 20 years ago to explain that humans were tipping the odds of harmful climate change by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. He displays one die in his Manhattan office.

Twenty years ago Monday, James E. Hansen, a climate scientist at NASA, shook Washington and the world by telling a sweating crowd at a Senate hearing during a stifling heat wave that he was “99 percent” certain that humans were already warming the climate.

“The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now,” Dr. Hansen said then, referring to a recent string of warm years and the accumulating blanket of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other gases emitted mainly by burning fossil fuels and forests.

To many observers of environmental history, that was the first time global warming moved from being a looming issue to breaking news. Dr. Hansen’s statement helped propel the first pushes for legislation and an international treaty to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. A treaty was enacted and an addendum, the Kyoto Protocol, was added.

Even as the scientific picture of a human-heated world has solidified, emissions of the gases continue to rise.

On Monday, Dr. Hansen, 67, plans to give a briefing organized by a House committee and say that it is almost, but not quite, too late to start defusing what he calls the “global warming time bomb.” He will offer a plan for cuts in emissions and also a warning about the risks of further inaction.

“If we don’t begin to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next several years, and really on a very different course, then we are in trouble,” Dr. Hansen said Friday at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which he has directed since 1981. “Then the ice sheets are in trouble. Many species on the planet are in trouble.”

In his testimony, Dr. Hansen said, he will say that the next president faces a unique opportunity to galvanize the country around the need for a transformed, nonpolluting energy system. The hearing is before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Dr. Hansen said the natural skepticism and debates embedded in the scientific process had distracted the public from the confidence experts have in a future with centuries of changing climate patterns and higher sea levels under rising carbon dioxide concentrations. The confusion has been amplified by industries that extract or rely on fossil fuels, he said, and this has given cover to politicians who rely on contributions from such industries.

Dr. Hansen said the United States must begin a sustained effort to exploit new energy sources and phase out unfettered burning of finite fossil fuels, starting with a moratorium on the construction of coal-burning power plants if they lack systems for capturing and burying carbon dioxide. Such systems exist but have not been tested at anywhere near the scale required to blunt emissions. Ultimately he is seeking a worldwide end to emissions from coal burning by 2030.

Another vital component, Dr. Hansen said, is a nationwide grid for distributing and storing electricity in ways that could accommodate large-scale use of renewable, but intermittent, energy sources like wind turbines and solar-powered generators.

The transformation would require new technology as well as new policies, particularly legislation promoting investments and practices that steadily reduce emissions.

Such an enterprise would be on the scale of past ambitious national initiatives, Dr. Hansen said, like the construction of the federal highway system and the Apollo space program.

Dr. Hansen disagrees with supporters of “cap and trade” bills to cut greenhouse emissions, like the one that foundered in the Senate this month. He supports a “tax and dividend” approach that would raise the cost of fuels contributing to greenhouse emissions but return the revenue directly to consumers to shield them from higher energy prices.

As was the case in 1988, Dr. Hansen’s peers in climatology, while concerned about the risks posed by unabated emissions, have mixed views on the probity of a scientist’s advocating a menu of policy choices outside his field.

Some also do not see such high risks of imminent climatic calamity, particularly disagreeing with Dr. Hansen’s projection that sea levels could rise a couple of yards or more in this century if emissions continue unabated.

Dr. Hansen is a favorite target of conservative commentators; on FoxNews.com, one called him “alarmist in chief.” But many climate experts say Dr. Hansen, despite some faults, has been an essential prodder of the public and scientific conscience.

Jerry Mahlman, who recently retired from a long career in climatology, said he disagreed with some of Dr. Hansen’s characterizations of the climate problem and his ideas about solutions. “On the whole, though, he’s been helpful,” Dr. Mahlman said. “He pushes the edge, but most of the time it’s pedagogically sound.”

Dr. Hansen said he was making a new public push now because the coming year presented a unique opportunity, with a new administration and the world waiting for the United States to re-engage in treaty talks scheduled to culminate with a new climate pact at the end of 2009.

He said a recent focus on China, which has surpassed the United States in annual carbon dioxide emissions, obscured the fact that the United States, Britain and Germany are most responsible for the accumulation of greenhouse gases.

Dr. Hansen said he had no regrets about stepping into the realm of policy, despite much criticism.

“I only regret that we haven’t gotten the story across as well as it needs to be,” he said. “And I think we’re running out of time.”

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Cheap vs Obsolete: Is the ‘Oil Drilling Debate’ Masking the Real Issue?

Several media sites have recently wrote scathing reviews of Bush’s plan to open up protected areas to drilling, while other media agencies wrote glowing reviews. Is it a political move void of all reason and common sense, or an enlightened plan to help Americans? President George W. Bush recently urged Congress to overturn a 26-year ban on offshore oil drilling in the U.S. and also open a part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to petroleum exploration. The arguments for and against were polarized, but for the most part, they all made some fair points, which begs the questions: Is it a good idea or not? Will it really make gas cheaper or not?

But the real underlying question being skirted around is this: Should we be focusing on making oil cheap or should we focus on making it obsolete? Of course in an ideal world, gas would be cheap and increasingly obsolete. We don’t live in an ideal world. It’s a catch 22 for Americans who are suffering from high gas prices, and it’s only natural to want to find ways to relieve that pressure quickly. The concern, however, is that by focusing on unrealistic “quick fix” solutions, we are just scraping ourselves up a little more time to keep avoiding the real issue.

It is not certain whether or not drilling for oil in the US will lower gas prices. For now, that answer is largely a matter of speculation (and will therefore depend almost entirely on who you’re asking) but there are a few basic facts and premises that can help us make sense of the debate. There’s not an absolute right or wrong, but we have to consider the cost/benefit ratio and consider which side makes the most sense. According to a 2004 study by the government's Energy Information Administration (EIA) drilling in ANWR would trim gas prices only by 3.5 cents a gallon by 2027. Even if we immediately opened the entire outer continental shelf to offshore rigs, and all of Alaska, the impact on gas prices is estimated to be very small and would not arrive until years from now. It wouldn’t even make a dent in prices at all in the immediate future, because there aren’t enough refineries to process large amounts of crude oil, and those would take time and considerable expense to build.

But on the other hand, finding huge oil reserves in the US could send a message to the market that there’s even more oil to go around, which could put speculation under control—at least for a little while longer. But will it? Based on past trends, probably not. Even if we found huge oil reserves, and we already know there are some out there, it’s not likely to change market conditions all that much. The world already has more than enough supply to meet demand. Oil prices are based on a global market, and even in the best-case scenario, the dent the US can make in that market is negligible. We simply do not have enough oil reserves—even in a wildly imaginative and positive scenario—to significantly change the price of oil in the global market.

Some politicians have publicly stated that they actually want higher gas prices. It’s the only way to wean ourselves off of our unhealthy addiction they say, but this view certainly lacks immediate compassion for the working class that has to find a way to get to work every day and still put bread on the table to feed their children. Environmental ideals are important, but they seem elitist and cold-hearted when you stack them against America’s families. However, the sad truth of it is that there will likely be no noteworthy relief in gas prices whether we drill or not.

But even if drilling did lower prices substantially and give immediate relief—a prospect that even Bush himself says is unlikely—no one can logically argue that oil will last forever. Peak oil is a real concern, so why aren’t we trying harder to get off of our oil addition altogether? Many question the validity of pouring money into even more oil infrastructure. Ideally, oil will be a non-issue sooner rather than later. It makes more sense from a long-term perspective to invest in clean renewable technologies that will always be there for us to rely on. Yes, we need oil at the present moment, and even in the best case scenario we will be at least partially dependent on oil for another decade or so, but if our predominant focus is on making oil cheaper, that’s only going to get us further away from the ultimate goal of making oil obsolete.

Posted by Rebecca Sato

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