It is clear that the United States must take on some sort of project for the betterment of our water management systems. With recent devastation caused by flooding from Hurricane Harvey, Irma, Maria, and others in cities like Houston, Texas and San Juan, Puerto Rico, the need for effective flood control measures are growing increasingly more necessary, particularly in coastal urban areas. Extremely effective flood control measures have been put in place in places like Holland already and the Dutch are dumbfounded as to why the US has not followed suit.
Water management across all areas must be dealt with rationally and effectively like in The Netherlands #bcsfh2o https://t.co/vDFEq6rMHP
— Matt Denaro (@mattdenaroMHC) October 31, 2017
According to the CNN article, after a ravaging 1953 storm in Holland, a country that is 7 feet below sea level, began discussing plans to prevent such an event from happening again. To contrast, since 1953, there have been 11 category 5 hurricanes that hit the US and have caused billions in damage, not to mention the loss of human life. By 1959, Holland had regulations and a plan of action to build the Delta Works, a system of dams and levees that now protect The Netherlands from catastrophic flooding. Although the project was costly, upwards of 5 billion dollars, this cost is nothing compared to the enormous cost of hurricane damage, both in terms of money and loss of life. Considering the magnitude and extent of these storms are only going to increase with the seemingly unceasing advance of global climate change, the US is long overdue for an improvement in their water management and flood control systems.
The fact that the Federal government has done nothing major to fix this issue of massive flooding, despite the technology being there for quite some time, is concerning. Not only does not bettering the current flood control systems cost billions and billions of dollars, but it also costs hundreds, if not thousands of lives. The technology is there, but the government is unwilling to take on the cost of it, despite spending billions per year on military spending, among other things that seem increasingly frivolous. Although updates to flood control systems are overdue, it is not too late to still implement them; however, considering the current administrations ideas about climate change and government subsidizing public works, it seems that this will not be achieved any time soon.
