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This year’s floods have brought more hardship along the Mississippi, but have efforts to control the river made matters worse? The Riverwalk Casino in Vicksburg was one of the last gambling establishments operating on the Mississippi during these historic floods, and the management lined the drive with insistent signs. “Still open”, they said, “Still happy”. Another sign, an electric one, bragged about the new decor. Workers had stuck pink plastic flamingos on the 4ft sand wall. The river had swallowed up the lawn and trees and was lapping at the parking lot. But a few people were still placing bets inside. After all, Americans have been taking their chances with the Mississippi for centuries. It has been more than 250 years since European settlers began building earthen embankments, or levees, on the Mississippi. It has been more than 80 years since America established a flood control system on the river that was supposed to prevent future catastrophes. It has been 40 years since Congress moved to compel local authorities to relocate people from flood-prone areas, or protect them through insurance. And it has been more than 15 years since Bill Clinton ordered a White House study to determine what could be done to reduce flood damage. So why has this year’s flooding of the Mississippi brought so much hardship to so many people? After Illinois, Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee, the swollen river is expected to reach its high water mark in southern Louisiana this week before emptying in the Gulf of Mexico. The authorities say they are confident their preparations will keep New Orleans above water. But small communities in Louisiana will face their worst flooding over the next week, and the waters are likely to stay until mid-June. Seen one way, the floods are an act of nature, beyond human control – and America got off relatively lightly. Despite extensive property damage, with predictions that more than a million acres of land would go underwater, only four deaths due to flooding have been recorded so far, in Arkansas and Mississippi. Industries, population centres and shipping in the Mississippi have been protected. Unlike in Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers, which is in charge of flood control, has had no levee failures. Looked at another way, the flooding was entirely predictable. Damage to homes and fields in the Mississippi’s way should have been avoidable. For all the effort over the years put into controlling the Mississippi, for many individuals – and even entire towns – there is only the illusion of safety. John Scroggins, 79, thought he knew all there was to know about floods. He spent 32 years as a civilian technician in the Army Corps of Engineers fighting floods. When he moved to the Magnolia Road are of Vicksburg in 1960, he knew it was a flood-prone area, but thought the possibility was relatively remote. His home, south of the city, is in what is known as a 100-year flood area. That does not mean it will flood only once every 100 years, but that there is a 1% chance of flooding each year. That is more than it seems at first. A house in a 100-year flood area has a one in four chance of getting flooded in the life of a standard 30-year mortgage. Scroggins decided that was an acceptable risk. He also believed he could outwit the Mississippi by building a foot higher than recorded flood levels. The extra foot would save him from having to buy flood insurance, he said, which he thought would be two or three times the cost of a homeowners’ policy. “The flood has never, never been here before, even in 1927,” which is the worst flood on record, he said. “It was always down there in the weeds. This is the grand-daddy of all floods, right up there beside Noah’s. If it hadn’t been for that we would never have seen water here. It’s always been down yonder.” Scroggins found himself paddling around to his next-door neighbour’s house in a flat-bottomed boat. His own property remains above water for now – but only because of a Herculean effort. Scroggins brought in 23 truckloads of sand and built a 5ft wall around it. Now he and his wife are virtual prisoners. Most of the neighbours have left. Scroggins worries that his wife, Wanda, 77, will break a hip if she clambers over the barrier. And if his homemade levee breaks, it will all be a wasted effort. On the opposite side of town, Shirley Burns watched her rented house in the Kings area fill up with people. Like other areas north of Vicksburg, Kings is mainly African-American, low-lying and flood-prone. Mira Jean Gordon arrived after the water in her house reached knee-level and the city turned the electricity off. Loretta Bunch turned up to report that the Waterville Estates, built to replace the old flood-prone housing, was taking on water. The basketball court and playground were inundated. Burns stayed glued to the large flatscreen TV. The waters had risen above the windows on two rows of houses on the other side of the tracks. Burns’s house sat a few inches higher. “It hasn’t affected us. It’s not in our yard yet,” she said. She would pack up and leave when the time came. But where to? “It’s not like you can just pick up and go. There are expenses involved and there is no storage facility available anyway,” she said. Floods are to be expected, she said, at least in these low-lying areas. “It’s a recurring thing. It skipped last year, but it’s been flooding for years.” There is complacency and resignation. Flood experts argue that America’s flood protection standards are lax compared with those in other countries. Authorities have hesitated to relocate people to safer ground, or to enforce laws that compel local authorities to provide flood protection and require homeowners to get flood insurance. “We have been very good at letting people continue to live in harm’s way,” said George Galloway, who was commander of the Army Corps at Vicksburg in the 1970s. “But how much longer can we continue to do that since we know with climate change we are going to have more floods than in the past?” In the 1990s, Galloway led a White House study into improving flood protection. It concluded that most people living in flood areas – up to 7 million across the country – did not fully understand the risks they faced. Most do not insure their homes or belongings against floods. Some might not even realise they are living in a flood-prone area. Others might think they are safe because they are living behind a levee, even though the standards for levees are relatively loose. “We have deceived ourselves into believing we are safe from floods, and that is not the case,” said Galloway. In the Louisiana town of Vidalia, it was getting harder to maintain that illusion as the town worked desperately to protect its prime real estate from floods. A development was planned to rival the grander town of Natchez across the river, with a convention centre, a 102-room hotel, a beauty salon, a surgery centre, a 40-bed hospital offering specialised care for patients on respirators, and a mobile home park. But it was entirely exposed, built between the Mississippi and the levee that protected much of the town. By last week, each building was a mini-fortress ringed with Hesco barriers. But it was the convention centre, the town’s pride, that was in most danger. Water was shooting up out of the grounds like a geyser, spewing chunks of earth and undermining the flood defences. Guy Murray, the town’s project manager, went nearly 48 hours without sleep overseeing the effort to plug the cantaloupe-sized hole, known as a sand boil, bringing in 250,000 tonnes of sand to stabilise the situation. Asked why the town chose to build on the wrong side of flood protections, Murray got a strange look on his face. The development was the pet project of his grandfather, the former mayor. “This was just a freak thing out of everybody’s control,” Murray said. “Every building is two feet above the 100-year flood line. This is just a God-given event. Nobody could have ever seen a river this high, ever.” Sheri Rabb, the spokeswoman for the town, laughed at the idea that the flood would force a rethink of development plans. Vidalia is counting on another chain hotel moving in, and was busy wooing other businesses. She said the town, which is relatively dilapidated, had not set a budget for fighting the flood. There was no need to rethink development plans. “This was just a fluke,” she said. “The water did come up in 2008 but this flood was unpredictable, like a tornado.” Why would a town bet so much on an unsafe proposition? America has been in training for a great flood since 1927, when the Mississippi rose so furiously it washed over or broke through more than 140 earthen embankments. About 500 people were killed and half a million left homeless. In the aftermath, Congress undertook to build a flood control system that would span the entire river. It was the most ambitious public works project in US history. It would be unthinkable in today’s budget-cutting times. The Army Corps of Engineers took up its mission in a red-brick building on a high, dry bluff in the centre of Vicksburg. As these floods got under way, military officials and civilian bureaucrats from the corps reviewed the latest data from the Mississippi: how high was the water rising, how much strain was the river exerting on the levees? Their mission, as it has been for 80 years, was to control the oil refineries and other industries that line the banks of the Mississippi from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Essentially, the plan has operated as a federal subsidy for the refineries along the river and for the rich farmland inside the flood plain, said Craig Colten, an environmental geographer at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “It has protected those industries. There has been no major flooding of those industries on the lower stretch of the river since 1927.” The Army Corps of Engineers established a system of 3,500 miles of levees and giant spillways. They would refine a protocol for triggering flood defences. Under orders laid out in acts of Congress from 1928, once water reaches a certain height or pressure, the corps commander is committed to certain responses – blowing up levees in Missouri, or opening up giant floodways in Louisiana – to reduce strain on levees around strategic areas. But some flood experts blame the corps for the very crisis it is facing now. They say it has lulled the public into a false sense of security about its ability to manage the Mississippi. Over the years, individuals and communities moved increasingly into flood-prone areas around the Mississippi because land is cheap, and because they were persuaded the risk of floods is low. It is becoming evident that the Army Corps of Engineers and other forecasters have underestimated the frequency of severe flooding along the Mississippi. “We had a 500-year flood in 1993, a 70-year flood in 2001, and a 200-year flood in 2008. What blows my mind is that I just published this paper in 2008 and every year since then we have had another 10-year flood,” said Robert Criss, a hydrologist at Washington University in St Louis. “The observed frequency of flooding is completely incompatible with the Army Corps estimates.” The forecasts at the time were based on a relatively short historic record. Snow and rainfall patterns change over time, altering the frequency and magnitude of floods. Climate change is also increasing the intensity of storms. Last April saw six times as much rain in the Ohio valley, which drains into the Mississippi, as in a normal year. Criss argues the Army Corps of Engineers forecasts have played down the flood risk, encouraging individuals and corporations to move into flood-prone areas where they are not safe. The corps’s levee-building strategy was also flawed because it did not give the rivers chance to move, Criss said. “We have actually made the flooding worse. Their homes are getting flooded all the time now,” Criss said. “We have got to start moving people and business out of the flood plain.” By the time General Michael Walsh, the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, began fighting these floods, his mission was refined to its essence – do not let more than 35,000 cubic metres per second of water rush down the Mississippi towards New Orleans. But it came at a cost. The only way to keep flood waters out of New Orleans was to redirect them. The plan called for flooding the Atchafalaya basin, keeping New Orleans safe but condemning scattered hamlets to drowning. “He held off on that decision as long as he could. He hovered at the tipping point for three or four days,” said Charles Camillo, the corps’s official historian. “We might not have operated had it not been for that last rainstorm. That broke our backs. The rain came in, and we could not hold any more water back.” Once the giant steel gates were lifted on the Morganza spillway, the forests and scattered settlements of Louisiana’s Cajun country began to fill with water. According to initial predictions, Butte La Rose, which has about 800 year-round and part-time residents, would be under more than 20ft of water. Days after the first gates were opened, there was no sign of flooding. Officials said the water was moving slowly because the ground was so parched because of a recent drought. In the past few days, Butte La Rose has seen a procession of moving vans as people hurriedly load up their belongings before the mandatory evacuation order goes into effect on Monday. Most of the homes are flimsy affairs – hunting shacks or trailers – but it was a wrench for their owners to leave them. “Come time I will move out,” said Earl Quebedeaux, sitting on a dock at the back of his trailer eating stewed tomatoes out of a tin. “But I don’t believe the water is going to get that high. Last night it only came up a couple of inches, same thing the night before.” And if it does get that high? “Even if it destroys my trailer I’m going to come back. I’ll just build me a house boat.” United States Flooding Louisiana Mississippi Natural disasters and extreme weather Suzanne Goldenberg guardian.co.uk