Disaster foretold

ROBERT CRISS does not relish his role as Cassandra of the Mississippi. For years the geologist at Washington University in St Louis has warned policymakers about building houses and businesses on flood plains, walling off rivers with dams, locks, dykes and levees, disregarding the consequences of global warming on weather patterns and the use of outdated statistics for calculating the risk of a major flood. “The devil could not have come up with a better plot,” he says.

Torrential rain started on December 26th and lasted three days, during which 9-14 inches (23-35cm) of rain deluged much of Missouri and parts of Illinois, according to the National Weather Service. Thousands had to evacuate their houses; businesses abandoned shops and stock. Amtrak stopped its local train service for four days and long stretches of the I-44 and I-55 interstate highways, as well as 200 state highways, were shut off. Twenty-five people died, mostly because they drove onto a swamped road and their cars flipped over. It will take months to rebuild what has been lost. Yet the bigger question is whether enough was done before the rains came to mitigate the impact of flooding.