Various Lies

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Blind stupidity or short memories

Wait a fucken minute, I know I'm not the most observant person ever...I tend to look at the big picture, not the important minutia (which is probably why I'm in admin and not bench science)... but by the flood level from 1927 that everyone is clamoring about, we're fucken over it. We're at 47 feet by "new" measurements, and something like 52 feet by "1927 measurements"...

Now I've seen this river flood the locale 5 out of the six years I've lived here. I figured the city planers who developed the sandbar I live on knew what the river did irregularly, and we'd be OK.

DOH!

It turns out Old Man River does this fairly damn regularly

Son of a bitch. 1927, 1937, [gap? drought? who knows what?] 1973, 1993, 2009 (my call), 2011...

Excuse my naivete as a 5yr n00b to the town, but WTF?

This happens on an almost decadal basis and still people are dying and being dispossessed? I understand you can't tame the river, but surely we could try and tame the local effects that we don't make hundreds homeless - or is it John Q. Public's right to build a fucken house in a flood zone?

4 comments:

punxxi said...

But we won't hear about it ad nauseum like Katrina.They collected money for about 50 years and spent the money everywhere but on the levees where it was supposed to go.Somehow I think it maybe the same over there in Tn.
Good luck!

JaySeeDub said...

If it's anything like the people constantly building homes on the Russian, Sacramento and Natoma Rivers in NorCal, they probably don't care until it floods. And if you point out they're building on a flood area, they get mad.

There are areas that insurance companies out here refuse to insure because of the flood possibility. Currently home owners and builders in the area are trying to bring suit to have flood coverage. It certainly sucks for the people that live there, but I just can't imagine forcing anyone to take liability on someone else's stupidity.

chall said...

No, ppl don't "care" to check theses things up before they build/buy. It's always "someone elses" problem. Until of course, the water hits.... then it's "our" problem. Jsut look at the location of the mobile home parks, on AR and TN side of the river. They've been flooded more regularily but the owners of the parks can still rent the place out for horrendous amounts of money.

Guess "we" don't belive in legislature?! duh. (I don't think legislature will make it all hunky dory but it might help a little!?)

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure of this in Memphis, but in many cases it's the poor that end up living at the lowest elevation/highest flood probability in big cities. Unfortunately, those same people don't have much of a voice or choice.