How to Flood Yourself and Wonder Why

A recent storm dumped rain on Southwest Washington State and Northeast Oregon. The floods that resulted illustrated on old principle known since before history but ignored by governments in the United States: If you displace water it will go somewhere else.

The storm was not by itself anything out of the ordinary for the Pacific Northwest. Such storms have battered this part of the U.S. since records were kept.

What on the short run is becoming out of the ordinary is the degree of flooding that follows. After this last storm for days 10 miles of Interstate 5 sat underwater. Semis with trailers lined for miles, parked, unable to move millions of tons of goods nationally or internationally.

I-5 again rises above water. Traffic flows. What also continues is one of the main reasons for the flooding: The filling up of flood plains with buildings and lately, in areas flooded in recent years, thanks to greedy but stupid local-government regulations, the building in the flood plain of malls, box stores and auto dealerships and the like on high mounds of gravel fill.

Why the mounds? To put the businesses above flood levels. Why the floods? Because these bumps of business in the flood plain reduce the size of the flood plain. The water seeking the sea has a smaller and smaller low area to spread through. Displaced, the water has to go somewhere and that somewhere is up, up the sides of the plain, flooding new areas, flooding to record heights.

The water level also elevates across the flood plain. Guess what now is happening? Even businesses on mounds built just a couple of years ago flooded. Got to go higher.

Who picks up the tab for the millions of dollars of goods ruined? Why the taxpayers, if the business owners were smart enough or forced to buy national flood insurance, which is backed by the U.S. Treasury. One forbears to mention the federal millions now coming into Oregon and Washington to help flooded homeowners and business people recover.

What are the government wise people deciding? Why, require higher mounds for locating new businesses on the flood plains. Stop allowing more businesses on the flood plain? You're insane to think of such an anti-American thing. It would kick the you-know-whats of flood-plain land speculators, which often are local officials controlling the building codes.

More and higher mounds will displace more water the next time a storm dumps an amount of rain that in the old days used to drain quickly and harmlessly into streams and rivers and thus to the sea.

That water in turn will flood new and higher areas. Mounds will have to rise higher. Eventually there will be no flood plain. Just malls, box stores and automobile peddlers on top artificial mountains reachable by elevated causeways crisscrossing constantly flooded and partly abandoned towns and cities.