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Old Posted Oct 14, 2022, 8:12 PM
wwmiv wwmiv is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Austin -> San Antonio -> Columbia -> San Antonio -> Chicago -> Austin -> Denver
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jmecklenborg View Post
It's not climate change, it's the...climate. It's the topography. We should have never let people build homes - by the millions - 10 feet above sea level on a peninsula that is vulnerable on all sides to tropical cyclones.

Yes, a house can be built of concrete to physically withstand flooding and high winds, but there is still enormous property damage from the ruining of furniture and appliances to the totaling of automobiles, public infrastructure, etc.

Again, tens of thousands of structures were seized and demolished in the 1900s by the Army Corps of Engineers all throughout the interior of the United States because they were situated on flood plains of the Mississippi, Ohio, and their tributaries. But Florida is like the rich girl for whom the rules don't apply, who gets to keep messing up and having her daddy buy her a new car every time.
And Seattle is the rich dad himself, because to him nothing seems bad compared to the big one.

I think the lesson you are drawing from the facts you presented can only be drawn because you didn’t properly contextualize those facts:


The federal government, as part of the WPA and associated complementary New Deal programs, built dams where they were appropriate to control flooding and for water supply and only seized properties in flood plains where the commercial value of the river (shipping, manufacturing, etc.) precluded building dams or where a system of locks could not closely approximate the water control of a dam.

In other words, we didn’t just go seize properties that were in flood plains. We first protected as many properties as possible by removing them from the floodplain and only then seized the properties to which we could not reasonably provide protection.

Miami, and much of South Florida, is an incredibly important and viable economic center, and we should at least attempt to provide adequate protection via new infrastructure before we start going and seizing people’s properties.
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