When Are We Going to Start Planning For Floods?

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News, Daily News, News Commentary, Politics

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2019

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, we’re following the enormous flooding in the Midwest. Climate change is magnifying the shortcomings of our river policies. We build in the flood plains, and we bracket our rivers with dams and reservoirs. But is it folly to think that we can control where the rivers run? Guest: Tony Messenger, metro columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Podcast production by Mary Wilson, Jayson De Leon, and Anna Martin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Missouri River is the longest river in North America.
0:08.8	It winds its way through seven states.
0:10.9	And as it snakes down through Montana and the Dakotas and into Nebraska and Iowa, it's
0:17.8	just this big drainage river of all of the snowpack, all of the moisture, everything
0:24.6	that happens in the upper Midwest eventually comes down the Missouri.
0:30.3	Tony Messenger writes that the St. Louis Post is spatch.
0:32.8	That's where the river ends.
0:34.8	In every spring, when the snow melts, he looks upstream to see where all this water's
0:40.8	going to go.
0:44.8	Over 300 river gauges are above flood stage as we speak.
0:50.4	This year, the water's gone everywhere.
0:53.0	Whole towns have been evacuated.
0:55.3	Roads are closed.
0:56.6	Nebraska estimates its agricultural industry is losing a million dollars a day.
1:00.9	Like this, where you have these communities that are just inundated with water, you can
1:05.1	also get water.
1:07.4	Tony could have told you this was coming.
1:09.5	The Missouri River is dotted with dams and levies, mechanisms that redirect and manage
1:15.7	the rivers flow.
1:17.6	Slow the water down.
1:19.1	We've been flooded up.
1:20.7	Days ago, Tony started getting these alerts from the Army Corps of Engineers as they released
	...

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