Feds Looking At Long-Term Changes To Deal With Floods

From Idaho’s mountain tops down to the valleys, people have altered the plumbing of the watersheds, dramatically changing the way water moves.

Ed Lettunich’s Payette ranch was inundated by the recent floods. He blames Mother Nature, but says civilization contributed to it. U.S. Highway 95 backed up floodwater onto his property and the town.

“Mother Nature will have her way, no matter where you build, but man shouldn’t compound the problem,” he said.

Floods now roll the same way that fires burn. Huge blazes during the recent drought revealed forest health deteriorated during a century of fire suppression.

Now some people, including Vice President Al Gore, are saying the poor watershed health may have contributed to back-to-back floods in Idaho.

With a heavy snowpack around the state, more floods could hit in the spring. After that, the government must decide how to rebuild roads, levees and even homes to reduce risks from the next floods.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has told local governments and individuals to go ahead with emergency repairs to reopen roads, patch dikes and return home.

But it urged local officials to reduce the risks of future flooding by installing larger culverts, for example.

“We want to offer as many incentives as we can, so that when it happens again, maybe it’s just an inconvenience instead of a crisis,” said Bob Freitag, the agency’s Idaho coordinator.

It is holding off authorizing - and funding - major work such as levee repairs until it can assess the flood plains.

“The levee issue is a hard one,” Freitag said. “It may be easier to elevate homes than build levees.”

Gore said he would recommend a federal task force to study watershed restoration in the Northwest. Its model would be one President Clinton appointed after 1993 flooding in the Mississippi River.

That panel shifted the federal response away from primarily engineered solutions, such as levees, to re-establishing wetlands and moving homes and an entire community to higher ground.

About 12,000 flood-damaged properties in the Midwest were relocated or elevated.