Our neglected levees

Levees generally come to the public's attention only when they fail, as they did this year in the Midwest and disastrously in New Orleans in 2005. But levees are a surprisingly common fact of American life and many people may not even be aware that they are living behind the protection of what is basically a pile of dirt.

The condition of those levees may be the country's greatest unmet infrastructure need, especially because climate change models forecast an increase in the intensity and frequency of heavy rainfall storms, and because people insist on building on flood plains.

Scripps Howard News Service reporters Lee Bowman and Thomas Hargrove reviewed the level of levee oversight and funding and came to some disturbing conclusions.

For a start, no one at any level of government knows where all the levees are, let alone what kind of shape they are in, or even how many there are. Estimates range from 20,000 to 30,000.

Maintenance of the levees, even those operated by the Army Corps of Engineers, is years and billions of dollars behind schedule. By one expert estimate, there is a $60 billion backlog of work but federal funding amounts to only $1.5 billion to $2 billion a year.

Relatively few new levees are being built. Those that are aim not to protect existing homes and businesses but to allow for development on flood plains, which flies in the face of all sensible flood control policy. In the St. Louis area, some 28 square miles containing $2.2 billion in new construction is on land that was under water 15 years ago. And some new developments are protected by old agricultural levees built to the lesser standard of protecting farmland.

Fewer than half the states have an agency specifically dedicated to levee safety and only 10 have a statewide listing of flood control works. And as Bowman and Hargrove reported, "While the known deficiencies in levees are worrisome enough, equally troubling are the unknown vulnerabilities."

The country lacks a uniform national flood control policy. The Army Corps doesn't even have the legal authority to inspect suspect levees outside the federal system. And there is a good argument for removing some levees because upgrading them costs more than what they're supposed to protect.

As the waterlogged river communities of Iowa and Missouri can attest, simply stacking the sandbags higher is not an effective flood control policy.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)