Since the first levee was built in New Orleans in 1717, we have been trying to manage America’s rivers. But now our infrastructure is failing. And if we don’t compromise on a plan to restore (or strategically remove) our dams, levees, and locks and give our waterways more space, flooding events will continue to devastate entire communities over and over again.
Tyler J. Kelley is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker, among many other national publications. His first book, Holding Back the River: The Struggle Against Nature on America’s Waterways, was published in April 2021. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Tyler joins Ross to explain why riverboat traffic is still important to the US economy, moving more than 1,000 semi-trucks’ worth of vital commodities daily.
Tyler discusses the extensive work we’ve done to manage rivers in the US, describing how much land would be unlivable without levees and why the risks of flooding will only increase with climate change. Listen in for Tyler’s insight on the Dutch Delta Works project to give land back to the rivers and fortify existing infrastructure and learn how we might create a similar comprehensive flood control plan to protect communities here in the US.
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Resources
Holding Back the River: The Struggle Against Nature on America’s Waterways by Tyler J. Kelley
‘The Fight to Tame a Swelling River with Dams That May Be Outmatched by Climate Change’ in The New York Times
Elizabeth Kolbert on Reversing Climate Change S2EP50
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori’s Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me journalist Tyler J. Kelly. Tyler, you have written for many publications, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and many others. And you just published your first book, gigantic congratulations. It’s called Holding Back the River, the Struggle Against Nature on America’s Waterways. Thanks for being here, Tyler. Thank you so much for having me, Ross.
It’s a pleasure. It’s great to have you. This is one of those books that, as we were talking before the show, it touches on so much that is in the zeitgeist right now. And you’re so prescient for writing this book ahead of time, given how long the lead times are for books, because it’s about climate, it’s about racial justice, it’s about infrastructure. How did you become a prophet? When did you learn that you have a gift?
Tyler J. Kelley: People might not remember, but around the 2016 election, a little more than exactly four years ago, we were talking about almost all of these same things. So that’s when I started this project. And that’s when I sort of got the okay to go ahead on the book. But I’d been interested in rivers and waterways and infrastructure for a while before that. And I’m not sure, you know, I think infrastructure rises and falls. It’s sort of a boring word. People don’t like to say it very often, you know, so it rises and falls in the zeitgeist.
But luckily, 2016 was a peak, and now 2020 is also a peak. You know, I really got into it just by chance. I was on this boat trip with a friend of mine. We were going down the lower Ohio River, and our outboard motor broke, and we happened to get stranded at this old kind of concrete ledge You know, brick building, kind of overgrown place on the riverbank there, which we didn’t really understand what it was. But we were stuck. I’m in the middle of nowhere in Illinois.
So I had to walk up these old stairs and find a guy who was polishing his motorcycle and say, hey, can you help us? Like, we really don’t know where we are, what we’re doing. Turned out he was, you know, employed there. This was a lock and dam. The dam happened to be down. These lock and dams, they can raise and lower the dam. And we ended up staying there for a night and a day, and the guys there at Lock and Dam number 53 couldn’t have been more hospitable.
They showed us all this cool old steam powered machinery that they used to raise and lower the dam, these beautiful old, you know, brick buildings and frame houses, all of this stuff was built in the 20s. And we’re still there at that time when I was there, which was 2014. And then later, as I learned more from a journalist standpoint about what these dams were for and why they were important, I was so struck by the fact that these really old and decrepit facilities were actually the most heavily trafficked block and dams in the United States.
And so simultaneously the most crumbling and the most important. And of course, that’s Incredibly compelling as a journalist to look into a place like that. So I went back there again and again and again for a New York Times story. And then for this book, I spent days and days and days hanging out with these guys. And they were kind enough to let me go out on their barges and watch them raise the dam, watch them get really frustrated and stressed out and upset, trying to raise the dam and the dam not cooperating.
So it’s just the way I put it, it’s an entire world. And I had no idea that it existed. And once I glimpsed it, I couldn’t get it out of my head.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s going to be the experience of many people listening to because our lives are no longer built around rivers like they may have once been. You referenced Mark Twain a number of times. How could you not? But not a lot of people go into Hannibal these days or maybe they go to New Orleans or Baton Rouge. But like Vicksburg, for instance, I don’t know anyone that... I don’t know.
Tyler J. Kelley: Yeah, so there’s a couple of pieces there. Riverboat traffic is extremely important for the United States economy. I’m sure if you were to look at not only a tonnage, the amount of goods that flows on the river, far more travels on the river now than in Mark Twain’s day. But the thing is, in terms of sort of like the popular imagination, it’s so kind of efficient and mechanized now, as is all Transportation, that the people aren’t necessary. So you move, you know, a couple of people on one tugboat, maybe it has a crew of seven, if it’s a big one, can push, you know, 15 barges, 25 barges down the Mississippi River, the Ohio River.
And I have to get the numbers, but I think, you know, that amount of barges is more than 1000 semi trucks worth of material. So all kinds of vital commodities are moving down the river every single day. You know, coal, whether we like it or not, grain, fuel, fertilizer, chemicals, metal, scrap, all these things, these sort of raw materials that our economy is based on are moving on the river all the time. But the thing about it is the barges don’t ever need to stop and they never do stop.
So they just go straight from New Orleans or Baton Rouge up to St. Louis, St. Paul, you know, even over to Oklahoma, up to Pittsburgh and beyond. But because it’s not this folksy gingerbread steamboat stopping in all the small towns, lowering this ornate gangway and letting off ladies with parasols or whatever, the sort of presence of these things in the popular imagination has pretty much gone to zero. But interestingly, Vicksburg is still the headquarters of the Mississippi Valley Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is basically sort of the most It’s kind of the top division within the Army Corps of Engineers, the way it’s structured, aside from Washington, D.
C., they’re a federal agency. But Vicksburg is sort of like Army Corps headquarters, aside from D.C., but it’s sort of the next most important location and the only one on the real river. So the top generals who are climbing up the ranks would go to Vicksburg and then to D.C., and then they retire. So Vicksburg is still really important for the Corps of Engineers. And I bet they’re one of the largest employers in Vicksburg, actually, to this day, because they have a massive presence there.
And a lot of their activities are still based in Vicksburg because it’s a real central location in terms of managing the entire Mississippi, which is what they propose to do. Vicksburg is still super important to them.
Ross Kenyon: The change in the perception of the river, if you go back, yeah, ladies in parasols, I think about riverboat gambling and these old like steamships. I also think this is not super relevant, but I think of the Karma Chameleon music video where Boy George is in some weird antebellum South partying on a riverboat. I don’t know that’s helpful for us here, but it stuck to me as like the least congruent music video I think I’ve ever seen. But there’s a glamour to it. And nowadays, I watched some YouTube video of some guys read, I think they read Huck Finn.
Like, what if we left from Minnesota and went all the way down, like down to New Orleans? Many of the cities that they stopped in, they’re like, this city, like, no one is here. It’s sketchy. It doesn’t feel that safe. Like, a lot of these towns are no longer the healthful, glamorous places maybe they once were. Is that a correct perception? Yeah.
Tyler J. Kelley: I guess I would say not. I mean, having spent a lot of time in these towns, like a lot of the Midwest, I guess, no, put it this way. It’s sort of the story of small town rural America. You know, people are moving out. The jobs aren’t there like they used to be. And that’s the same if you’re in a small town in New York State, West Virginia, Mississippi, Iowa, Illinois. It doesn’t really make a difference. You know, small town America has gotten, you know, a lot smaller.
And if you can’t drum up a tourist trade, which is what Hannibal’s done off of Mark Twain, you know, if you can’t get tourists to come, you’ve got agriculture, you know, you’ve got Maybe an aluminum factory, if you’re lucky, a grain elevator or something like that. And there’s just not many places for people to work. And yet, the population that was originally drawn there by all this activity is to a certain extent still there. So I think if you look at Places that are losing population, places that are, you know, impoverished in the United States, you’ll find a lot of them along these rivers.
So I wouldn’t sort of characterize the places as particularly sketchy or like shells of their former selves. But, you know, I think they just it’s a story of rural America, small town America. That’s sort of what I saw when I was there.
Ross Kenyon: That’s good. Thanks for the correction or the update on that. That was only one side of it, I’m sure. So thank you. So we recently had Betsy Colbert on, we talked about her latest book, Under a White Sky, and it also has a section about the various ways in which we try to manage rivers, which I think We sort of take for granted. I think as a contemporary person, I take for granted that the natural world is fixed. It mostly operates the same. It doesn’t change a lot.
It’s predictable. And rivers in their natural untamed state are not that, right? So how much work has been done to manage rivers? Is such a thing possible? What does a wild river look like compared to something like the Mississippi now?
Tyler J. Kelley: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s first important to say that all of these rivers are still very much alive. I mean, you can feel it, you can see it every single day. You know, they’re up to something. They’re changing. You know, I grew up in Minnesota, which is the land of 10,000 lakes and a lake. Is like a static thing, no disrespect to lakes, but lakes don’t, they don’t have this sort of, they’re not animated, they’re not living, they’re not morphing and changing in the same way that rivers are.
So even the really managed rivers, say the Mississippi, Illinois, Ohio, are very much alive and are always changing and, you know, essentially trying to regain the characteristics that they had before they were You know, fenced in with levees and blocked by dams, etc. So your question is, what have we done? I mean, we’ve done a humongous amount to try to control these rivers, you know, untold trillions of dollars starting, you know, from the 1700s when the French built the first levee in New Orleans, I think it’s 1717.
All the way, you know, I guess the height of sort of the big dam era was 1950s, 1960s. And we were, you know, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, building gigantic dams all over the country, you know, from 1717 till then. And then, you know, I think now we’re kind of in the decline. People talk more about taking dams down than building them. So we’re probably not at peak dam right now. We’re not at peak sort of like river control. I mean, I think there are still many rivers that are vital, again, to the economy, also vital just to, and this is something I really didn’t understand before I went down into the Mississippi Valley, but the very land that people inhabit would not be livable if not for these levees.
You know, there’s, I think the 1927 flood, which blew out all the levees that had been in the Mississippi Valley up till that time, flooded 16 million acres, I think is the number. And so that’s how many acres would sort of essentially belong to the Mississippi if we hadn’t put these levees there. And that includes, you know, many cities, mostly farmland, but a lot of small towns. I mean, a lot of industry, you know, untold. Value, assets, wealth, property, however you want to quantify it, right?
And so that exists as part of our economy, as pieces of private property because of these flood control structures. And that fact, I think most people have no idea. And I was astonished to learn it when I went down there.
Ross Kenyon: No, I think it’s functionally invisible to many people. And I love nerding out on this book because it’s one of those things that once you see it, it’s very hard to unsee. You’re like, oh, wow, the amount of work that goes into making these spaces livable. I’m very curious what it would look like if a river like the Mississippi were untamed and were not strung along the sides with levees and dams and all this attempts at control. Would we be able to live alongside it? Or how much breathing room would we have to leave the Mississippi so that we were not constantly in peril of floods?
Is it some enormous swath of the country?
Tyler J. Kelley: Yeah, I mean, it’s actually the much easier to look at it on a map than it is for me to explain it. But there’s sort of a football shaped piece of land, starting at the southern tip of Illinois, actually just north of the southern tip in southeast Missouri and stretching down, you know, about Maybe to Baton Rouge a little farther and it widens out in the middle, heading out way over into Arkansas, like towards Little Rock and way over kind of into towards the middle of Mississippi. And then it narrows back as it goes north.
Most people don’t know this geography, especially if you don’t live that way in that area. But it’s so it’s a massive swath of land. And that’s all the historic floodplain of the river. And so I don’t think you’d be able to reliably do anything in that area. Well, let’s put it this way. You could farm in that area because I think flooding and farming can coexist. And that’s something that’s not, I think, talked about enough because depending on what kind of crops you want to plant, Water rises in the spring.
It recedes. By May, early June, you could plant your soybeans or whatever else. You know, you can’t plant corn, at least not contemporary corn, the way it’s genetically modified, I guess. The way these seeds are constructed, designed, they won’t mature fast enough, but you can plant soybeans. You could probably plant a lot of other things, too, once the water receded. So I think farming and flooding can coexist, but Any kind of structures, any kind of habitation, I think would have to be put on stilts.
Most of those 16 million acres, you’d have to move St. Louis, you’d have to move parts of Vicksburg. Memphis, I think is safe. You’d lose a lot of Southern Illinois. I don’t think a lot of the cities on the Ohio are safe. Louisville, Cincinnati, I think are at risk. If you were to take the levees down, keep in going down the river, a whole bunch of small towns in the Mississippi Valley, Greenville, Mississippi, Helena, Arkansas, on down to Baton Rouge, gone, New Orleans, gone.
Baton Rouge is behind about a three-story levy. It’s the biggest levy you can see in the United States. It’s in the vicinity of Baton Rouge, maybe a little bit up and downstream. So that entire area couldn’t exist. Everything had to be on stilts, big stilts. Not to mention, I think for the Reversing Climate Change podcast, people might not Well, people might be happy if this stuff got washed away, but there’s a really intense industrial corridor stretching from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, which has a huge percentage of the United States' chemical production, oil refining capacity.
It’s incredibly dense, giant flaming chimneys everywhere, huge pipelines and stacks and tanks. And so all of that has to move. Or I mean, you could... Maybe Biden and Congress can engine the economy so we don’t need that stuff anymore, but I haven’t seen that bill hit the floor of Congress yet. So it’s, I mean, can it be undone? I don’t know. It’s an interesting thought experiment, right? I think it’s going to be addressed in the everything on three-story stilts bill of 2023. How many trillion is that going to cost?
Have you tally that up?
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. We’re throwing a trillion here, a trillion there, trillion at stilts. I like the idea of farming existing alongside flooding because I can imagine people listening would say that, well, they’ve grown up with stories of the great flood of such and such. And there’s many of these. And it’s mostly farms and farmsteads getting washed away in many cases.
Tyler J. Kelley: And towns, though. I mean, people die in those floods. And a lot of these small towns get washed away, too.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, sure. I don’t mean to say there’s no loss of life. I think they’re more rural in their orientation or small town life. But I also think of something like the Aswan Dam in Egypt. Egyptian fertility along the Nile was from silt coming from the upper Nile, right? And then coming down and washing into the Nile Delta. And that’s no longer a thing. But that’s why the fertility was so great, right? They can co-exist, right?
Tyler J. Kelley: Yeah, they can. And I can’t speak on Egypt. I’ve never reported there. And I have an anecdote in my book, a gentleman named Lester Gooden that I was really taken with. He owns a farm on a place called Thompson Bend, which is sort of a bulge out into the river, a bend in the river. And when the levee there got washed away, you know, I think a generation or two ago, maybe in the 50s, they never rebuilt it. And what they did instead to prevent the Mississippi from scouring, which means, you know, with the force of the river going straight across this bend, instead of going the long way around it, it was inclined to You know, start to erode the land and create a new channel, a shortcut essentially across this bend.
And they didn’t want that to happen because it would have obliterated their farmland. So Lester and his neighbors planted trees along this bend. That was their solution. He said they planted cottonwoods because they grow fast, ash because they’re strong, and pecan trees to make a little money. And within maybe 30 years, they had 40-foot trees on this land. And as farmers, they gave up 80 acres out of production forever, which for a farmer is a really hard thing to do, to give up productive land and make it nonproductive.
But in exchange for this, you know, they gave that up. But, you know, Lester tells a story of, again, these famous floods. The flood of 93 was big on the Missouri and the upper Mississippi. And it came through, you know, probably a million cubic feet of water per second or more. And it broke some of the trees, but it didn’t scour out their land. Instead, I think he got, he said they got two inches of new soil. So that process of deposition of fertility is still possible.
You know, and don’t get me wrong, they have a, there’s a levee. You know, back up this piece of land. And that levy is actually the most critical levy in the entire United States in terms of acreage at risk. It’s called the Commerce to Birds Point Levy. It protects two and a half million acres. So, you know, I think most people would agree you don’t want to let two and a half million acres get flooded, but you could do more of what, you know, Lester Gooden has done, allowing the levy to come back and allowing the land to get, you know, To get washed by the flood.
And again, this guy Lester owns, I don’t know, many, many acres, probably over a thousand. And this Thompson Bend property is for whatever reason his favorite. He goes there all the time. He loves it. He would take me there every chance he got. And, you know, the crops are beautiful and he gets really good yields off this land. So it’s a fabulous piece of land from a farmer’s perspective, you know, but it also can flood. And that’s what I think, you know, those connections, farmers and Environmentalists or whoever’s trying to take down a levy or take down a dam are so often really at odds and can agree about almost nothing and don’t even talk to each other.
So that’s why I think this story is so worthwhile.
Ross Kenyon: Could not other farmers imitate Lester Gooden and just plant trees or find ways to slow the water down or to see the advantage of having a floodway on their property? Or is it just the lack of stilts and other types of planning just make this a political non-starter? Oh, also giving up acreage, also not a popular thing for farmers.
Tyler J. Kelley: Yeah, I think it would need to be the politics and like the approach to the popular will would need to be different. There was a proposal along the Missouri River where they came in after the flood of 2011, which was devastating across the whole middle of the country. But they came in after the flood of 2011, which blasted away all these Missouri River levies. The Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District came down to this certain area and said, hey, Steve McLaughlin, Your levy’s gone, what if we move your levy back, you know we’ll pay for I think construction of the levy but you’ve got to pay for the right of way and there was a proposal put forward a serious proposal.
Steve McLaughlin, Would set the levy back and of course moving the levies back gives you a much greater protection from flooding and so. You actually don’t need to build the levees higher if you set them back to gain protection against a much larger flood. So you would have reduced the chance of these levees blowing out, which they’ve done, you know, every 30 years since they were built, basically, if not more often. And they blew away again in 2019 because the farmers said no to this. But so the farmers said no.
They said, you know, we can’t afford it. But I think it was also kind of the political antagonism between, you know, these guys coming down from the big city trying to take our land. And, you know, I’m not sure if they could have negotiated it better. Maybe if the federal government had been willing to pay more to compensate them more, if there’d been more, you know, money behind it, political will behind it, if it could have succeeded, if there had been more of a conversation with the farmers in this particular levy district about how to get this done.
But, you know, they were, again, so... They got washed away in 2011, rebuilt the levees, washed away again in 2019. You know, catastrophe after catastrophe. And, you know, I really think a lot of the 2019 flooding could have been prevented if they’d done these setbacks and more setbacks. And so, you know, maybe now is a better time. Maybe since the trauma of these repeat events is fresh, now is a better time to go down and ask people, Who’s responsible for starting these conversations and making this happen?
Is this the Army Corps of Engineers or someone else? It’s a good question. I mean, the Army Corps of Engineers has certain, they can start certain conversations given the authorities they’ve been given by Congress, and that varies from river to river, even from sort of project to project, like, you know, within, there’s this giant dams on the upper Missouri River. So if you’re, you know, talking about one of those dams, the Corps would have authority to do X, Y, and Z in relationship to those dams, but not, you know, something else.
And so, but no, to answer your question truly, I think It would be much better coming from Congress. I think if Congress, which is really who calls the shots for what the Corps does and doesn’t do, if Congress were to say, this is a priority, we’d like to reduce the risk here of this happening again, Why don’t you give me some good solutions? Why don’t you give me some creative ideas about how to solve this problem? I think the core is really good at solving problems, but they need to be asked by someone.
Think of it as like an assignment. Here’s your assignment. Solve this problem. And I don’t think that has happened, maybe anywhere, at least not that I’m aware of. So I think it has to do with, again, political imagination, sort of reimagining A lot of these structures, reimagining the relationship to a lot of these rivers. And again, you can retain a lot of the benefits, a lot of the agriculture, the settlement, the industry, whatever you value, you can retain a lot of that, I think, but you have to start a new conversation saying, what do we have to give up?
Who do we have to compensate to reduce this risk of suffering these losses again and again and again, which is what’s going to keep happening.
Ross Kenyon: Really, it hurts my head. I would not want to be in the position of trying to negotiate between all of these stakeholders. It seems like you’re asking someone to give something up almost no matter what. What is one even supposed to expect? Ideally, okay, assuming you’re just an authoritarian state and you can do whatever you want and come what may, what would be the best way to interact with this river? No holds barred.
Tyler J. Kelley: I mean, you would retreat from it in a certain, you’d pick a width, you know, from the bank of the river, this way, so many feet, that way, so many feet, and you’d just pull everything back except for trees and plants and whatever. No structures, no levees. You just have to give it more space. Is it the full football or less than that? I don’t know. That’s a good question. So going back to the Missouri River, which is the one I have the real facts on because they did propose the change.
And this is interesting. The original plan for managing the Missouri River put forward in 1944 called for, I think, a 3,000 foot wide floodway in a certain section and then a 5,000 foot wide floodway as it gets lower down towards St. Louis. Of course, there’s more water in the river, so you widen the floodway. So that’s the space between levees, right? But because land creation and cultivation and agriculture was sort of a corollary justification of this project. Again, this is an authorization, a bill from Congress, Flood Control Act that authorized this project.
The farmers were allowed to start encroaching on this width and building their own levees much closer to the river than the Corps of Engineers thought wise, even in 44, let alone now. Right. So even in 44, they knew we should have 3000 feet here and 5000 feet here. But they didn’t get it because there were so many competing interests asking them to do so many different things with the Missouri River that they weren’t allowed to enforce that width between the levees. Now, the farmers built their own levees much closer to the river.
The Corps couldn’t really do anything about it because the farmers were being encouraged by other groups or politicians or whatever to build your levee here, farm this land, feed fruitful and multiply. And they studied it. Now, as it stands, there’s some spots that are 1,000 feet wide instead of three, instead of five. So when you constrict the river like that to only a thousand feet, of course, the water rises because it can’t keep going. It can’t spread out. And so you’re creating all of this risk in these thousand foot wide areas.
And that’s what the Omaha engineers said when they came down to this part of southwest Iowa to make this proposal. I said, you know, these thousand foot width areas are going to keep blowing up. There’s nothing we can do here except move the levees back. And as far as I know, they still got those thousand foot widths. They haven’t been able to do anything about it. But so it’s like a mistake that we knew about in 44 that’s still standing there on the ground today.
Ross Kenyon: I love the game theory of this too, where if someone upstream of you puts up a levee, you certainly have to, or you’re going to get, but then the person downstream is also like, oh no, I have to put up a levee. And then you get to the point where the entire river is constrained by these levees, more water, none of it escapes now. And it just becomes more and more destructive. I love the logic of it. It’s ruthless.
Tyler J. Kelley: Well, you know, and you make a good point. There’s the Mississippi River is in really exist in two very distinct parts, the lower Mississippi, which is after the Ohio comes in and the upper Mississippi. And because of the devastating flood of 27, you know, which I think cost a third of the GDP of the country at that time. Wow. There’s a huge amount of money, tremendous destruction, death, everything, the worst because of that flood. All the parochial districts who had been doing that game of elevate my levy, stand up here with a rifle, don’t let the guy from Arkansas come over.
They’d been doing that until 27, but then they just got wiped away. I mean, they were gone. They were so tired and wet after this. They couldn’t possibly, they didn’t have money to do a thing. So they were willing at that point to let The federal government in the guise of the Army Corps of Engineers and this entity called the Mississippi River Commission come in and say, okay, guys, we have a plan for this whole thing, the whole lower Mississippi from southern Illinois to the Gulf.
We’re going to build one system, no more kind of piecemeal levy war. We’re going to build one system and we’re going to manage every drop of water, you know, from Southern Illinois to the Gulf. And we’re going to know where it’s going to go. We’re going to know when it’s going to get there. And then when it gets too high, we’re going to let it out of the river in a controlled way. And so they designed, I think it was four or five, I think it was five floodways were intended and four were built.
And so then floodways, again, as most hydrologists I talk to say, this is the right idea. You have to do this. We actually need more of this. These floodways are a controlled way to let water out of the river. So there’s one in Southeast Missouri. There’s one that lets water out of the Mississippi into Lake So, you know, I think that’s a good thing. Their worst event was 93, but for whatever reason, after 93, they weren’t able to come together, or maybe there was never really the proper sort of proposal put forward, or maybe the devastation and misery wasn’t great enough.
I don’t know. Sociologists have to figure out. But they never got a comprehensive plan and they still don’t have a comprehensive plan. So they still have these piecemeal levy wars in the upper Mississippi. And so this gets covered in the media regularly. You know, there’s one levy district called Snye Island. It’s in Illinois and they have a great levy. And then the other district across the river, I forget what they’re called, in Missouri, they got a little lowly levy and they get flooded and the Snye Island people are protected.
And it’s just, it’s really unfair, right? But essentially the way it is now, it’s really hard to raise or lower a levy anymore. There was sort of a time to do it when the getting was good, but that time has passed. So pretty much the status on the upper Mississippi is fixed. And so you’ve got your winners and you’ve got your losers. And because everyone’s bickering, no one’s willing to sort of, I mean, they’ve put forward plans here and here and there, but none of them have ever, for whatever reason, been able to happen.
So you have a totally different situation in one part of the Mississippi than on the other. And the people on the upper Mississippi would love to have a system like those on the lower Mississippi. And yet, They can’t put together, again, the popular will, the political will to make that happen.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Is it okay to understand a levy as the opposite of a floodway? Is that an appropriate way to understand the relationship between these two strategies?
Tyler J. Kelley: I suppose, you know, a levy would hold the river back, a flood would let the river in. And a floodway would be, a floodway is defined by levees usually because you don’t want the river to go where you don’t want it to go. You want it to go where you do want it to go. So yeah, I think floodways and levees work together or can. But again, sort of the sense of the greater good. There’s a really interesting case in 2011 with this place called the Bird’s Point near Madrid Floodway, which is the one in Southeast Missouri.
There was a black community called Pinhook that had built their homes in this floodway. They had come up from Tennessee in the 40s, the people that started that community. And the way this story is told, at least in this testimony to the U.S. Senate, is that they never had really an authentic choice about where to buy land because this is still Jim Crow, Missouri. And so they were basically restricted to these marginal floodable acres in the floodway. And they bought it. They were happy to own the land.
So they bought it. They built a prosperous little town on it. People owned their own land. They had lovely homes and farmland with inside of their homes. And for... Decades and decades and decades, the floodway was never operated. So nobody really ever thought, white or black, farmers, whoever, nobody thought that this floodway was ever going to be operated again. It had been operated in 1937. And people thought so much has changed since then. It hasn’t happened since. Nobody thought it was going to happen.
But in April 2011, the river started rising and rising and rising and it kept rising. And I’m not sure how exactly the communication strategy from the Corps of Engineers went out to the public, but the way the residents of Pinhook tell me the story is they found out on Facebook that this was going to happen. I had very little warning. They rushed to their houses. Water was already rising because it backs into the floodway through an opening at the bottom. It’s hard to explain if you don’t have a picture of this, but water was already close to going over the roads because they had some low-lying pieces.
Pinhook was almost on an island. It was a really stressful and traumatic experience for the Pinhook residents to load Semi-trucks and U-Hauls and elderly people, disabled people, people’s entire lifetimes of possessions. Of course, they didn’t get everything and rushing to carry it out of the floodway. Then the National Guard set up checkpoints and they couldn’t get back in. And that was that. And then the night of May 2nd, 2011, the Army Corps blew the levy, according to the plan, actually a little bit after they were supposed to, because there was this lightning.
And then the water came in, 400,000 cubic feet of water. I forget, I think Niagara Falls is 100,000 going full force. So it’d be four Niagara Falls' worth of water, just destroying these homes, destroying everything in the floodway, really. The flood is 130,000 acres, just wiped clean, pretty much. And so to this day, I think that people tend to feel really upset about how they were treated. They feel like they were treated differently because they were black and the power structure within the county state core was white.
They don’t feel like they were communicated with. They don’t feel like they were communicated with sort of respectfully. And even after the fact, it took them so long, you know, filing paperwork, trying to get grants, dealing with FEMA to get some money together to build You know, nine new homes, ultimately, on nine little portions of land out of the floodway in another city, you know, fairly close. But even that process, you know, I feel like they felt really like they should have been treated better by the United States government, which chose to wreck their houses and they felt like should have provided them with new houses and should have given them fair warning, assisted them with moving.
I mean, every step of the process, I agree with them, was managed poorly. Interesting moral quandary there is these floodways and from a policy standpoint are important. From a policy standpoint, you’re going to want more floodways if you’re going to manage more risk on these big rivers. The question is, how do you deal with people who live there, who have lived there for generations, who own this land? How do you deal with them equitably and fairly? How can you get them to buy into this, to get them on board for this?
It’s a tough question.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds extremely difficult. And then not only on the policy side are those problems in existence, but I imagine on the private side, many of these homes surely must be very difficult to find insurance for. And insurance companies must be trying to tell them like, we can’t offer you a policy anymore because there’s a decent chance your home is going to be washed away and we’re going to be out for it. Is that happening right now or not yet?
Tyler J. Kelley: There’s ongoing kind of debates about what insurance companies should do or can do or are doing. If you have a solid federally certified levy in front of your house, you don’t need flood insurance because you are not in the flood zone. Or maybe you need very low flood insurance. I’m not sure. But that’s a critical thing. If you’re managing a levy, and I talk to a lot of people that manage levies, you negotiate with FEMA and the Corps of Engineers to get, you want to be accredited Federal levy.
So it counts as flood protection. So you don’t buy flood insurance as if you’re in the floodplain with no levy. Some of the people I know are probably going to say, Tyler’s saying this wrong because it’s so technical how this stuff goes back and forth. But essentially, you can get a great benefit if not total pass on flood insurance if you live behind a federally certified levy. And not everybody does. And that’s not if you live in a floodway. If you live in a floodway, I think Pretty much bets are off in terms of insurance.
But you can get insurance if you live in a floodplain, and you can definitely get insurance if you live behind a levee, which most people do live behind levees. Or down in the Gulf Coast, a lot of settlements are going up on stilts. And they’re really way ahead of the rest of the country on that. After Katrina, you drive down to some of these dead-end roads in the Delta, especially west of New Orleans, and almost all the buildings are on stilts once you pass a certain point.
How do you see this changing with climate change? I mean, the simple answer is risk increases, right? For hurricane storm surge, if you’re talking about the Gulf Coast, sea level rise, and just increased precipitation. So more snow, more rain. And so all of this risk goes up. And again, I talked to some really brilliant people at the Corps of Engineers who said we could do modeling to look ahead and figure out, you know, what’s the probability of increased rainfall? What’s the probability of snowpack?
How will this go up? Where is this water going to go? And once they did that study, they could build a more efficient and more nimble flood control system, but they need Again, they need the authority. They need to be asked by Congress. It would cost millions of dollars to run these studies. They can’t just spend that money because they feel like fending it. So it’s not insurmountable. And I think the expertise is there. The engineering and science is not the hard part.
But I think you have, again, it’s the political will, popular will, political imagination. And then it has to start with leaders who are interested in solving new problems, who recognize there are problems, who are willing to change things, who are willing to ask questions. And so far, we haven’t seen that.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a good example with climate, but you have a similar example in the book about dams not being built with silt or sediments in mind, which how does that even get off the ground with such a fundamental aspect of rivers not taken into account? How does that happen?
Tyler J. Kelley: Yeah, it’s a good question. And I think that you’ve got to assume, again, back in the 40s or the 1840s or 1740s, people knew about sediment. They weren’t dumb. But what I think they did is What was dumb is they looked at costs and benefits, and there’s an economic model you can use that evaluates costs and benefits out through time. And so if you say, and there’s a paper by a guy named Roland Hodgkiss at Brigham Young University, and he studied this. He’s, I think, a hydrologist or something.
But what the core did in the 50s when they were building all these dams and earlier is they said, okay, well, the sediment will fill this reservoir up with dirt, basically, and render the dam useless in 100 years or 200 years or 1,000 years. So that... That problem is not important enough for us to spend extra money now in 1950 to manage such a problem because it’s too far away in the future. So there’s a way that they... And this is way over my head in terms of economics, but there’s a way you devalue benefits the further they go into the future.
And so this guy looked at it and said, basically, for the core of engineers, a benefit more than 30 years in the future is worth nothing. They won’t spend a dime now to... It’s called the discount rate, right? Discount, yeah. The discount rate. So they knew that the problem was there. But in 1955, it wasn’t worth spending five extra million dollars to put in a sediment management system because if the dam stops functioning in 2055, they didn’t care, basically. It’s on track to do that, at least this one.
And it’s on the Missouri River, but it’s between Nebraska and South Dakota. Gavins Point Dam, which is the smallest dam on the Missouri River. It’s still massive. But from 1955 until now, it’s, I think, 30% full of dirt. Meaning it has 30% less space for water. And you can see this sort of delta complex taking over the lake and it’s advancing into the lake as it becomes sort of this textbook sedimentary delta complex advancing, advancing, advancing into the lake. And each time you have a giant flood event like 2019 or 11, they can measure quarter mile advancement into the lake of all the sediment because it happens in blasts.
It doesn’t necessarily happen one grain at a time every day. So the benefits on that lake are rapidly being diminished. Another side of that is, When you fill a lake with sediment, you raise the water table. And so there’s all of these corollary costs, if you want to put them in that way. Farmland flooded, towns flooded, federal government’s on the hook to buy out the farmland, to relocate the towns. The Santee Sioux Nation owns a bunch of land up there, and they think they’ve lost about a thousand acres.
And they’re thinking about what they can do to like It’s called a takings claim. You say the federal government took my land without just compensation under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. So they’re looking into what they can do. Private individuals have already sued. There’s a highway that needs to be raised. And it’s just going to keep happening. And it happens on other dams, too. If you want to keep going up to Missouri, I know they relocate a whole neighborhood in Pier or Fort Pier, South Dakota, which is behind another dam.
And so, again, you know, there’s a short-sighted decision that’s made at a certain point in time. And then the consequences just build and build and build and seem to go on forever. I mean, and will only get worse, right?
Ross Kenyon: I think also you talk about the Missouri is some indigenous word for big muddy or something like that. And various Western rivers do have a lot of sediment in them historically, no matter what humans were doing or not doing. But also we have given mono I mean, sediment loads are way down from historic levels, mostly because of dams. If you look at the combined Mississippi-Achafalaya system, the dams on the Arkansas-
Tyler J. Kelley: And the dams on the Missouri, I think I’ve cut the sediment down by 60% from 100 years ago levels, because so much of the sediment into the Mississippi is brought from those dry Western areas. If you can picture, most people don’t know that the Missouri and Arkansas go out to the Great Plains to the edges of the Rocky Mountains. So picture all that dry air land. And water bringing all that, you know, dust and sediment into the Mississippi Atchafalaya system. You know, you’re right that farming practices are much more efficient now.
And so they can speed the water off the land and the land doesn’t hold water or store water anywhere near the way it used to. And there is a caveat, I guess, to that. There’s some, I think, people who will say that in the Mark Twain days, like 1840, 1860, there was, the river was more Mm-hmm.
Ross Kenyon: Is it good that sediment is in rivers? I think you have some case in there about clean water coming out of dams means the water wants to pick up sediment from where it comes out and just scours the river deeper, makes it faster, something like that. Is that what’s happening?
Tyler J. Kelley: Yeah, absolutely. No, water has to have sediment. Each stream, depending on its characteristics, has a sediment load, the amount of sediment it actually wants to carry. And it varies from river to river, depending on geology, topography, all these other things. But the Missouri River, you know, since it’s at a shallow grade and the bed is aluvered, So if you build a dam and block all the sediment in the river and let only clear water flow over your spillway, the water will immediately start to erode whatever hits next.
And so there are these places, you know, just past Gavin’s Point Dam, the town of Yankton, South Dakota, where the riverbed has fallen in some places 10, 11 feet. And so you can go to this landscape. It doesn’t look weird at first, but you see the riverbank is less dry ledge way up here. And no cottonwood trees grow on that riverbank anymore because cottonwood needs to have its roots pretty much in the water. And the bank is too high up. For a cottonwood to get its roots in the water.
And instead, these invasive red cedar trees are growing, which are dry upland trees. So the whole ecology of the riverbank has changed. The whole ecology of the river has changed. It’s pretty. You’ve got your sandbars and your river down here, but that’s way below the level of the historic riverbanks, which are up. Practically above your head, if you’re down on this river, which I have been. And there are also, there’s other places like around the Kansas City area. Again, riverbanks fall at the bottom of the river.
So the river itself has fallen 10 feet or so. And there’s all kinds of, again, you know, there’s all kinds of problems it creates because you build structures with the assumption that the bottom of the river is here. You build your bridge, you put your water intake. For your power plant, for your utility. So there’s one utility that I spoke with, Water One. It’s just outside of Kansas City. And they actually had to spend their own money, $2 million, to put an auxiliary low water intake in at their plant.
And they give water to 400,000 people. And so that whole system was in jeopardy because the riverbed had fallen so much. And they learned it the hard way during one of the drought years on the Missouri, where they had to put a barge out into the river with a pump on it to get water up to this plant because their intakes were above water. So there’s all kinds of, again, money that’s getting spent, people that are having to do creative things or, you know, desperate things to compensate, right, for this.
So sediment in water is good. And a brilliant guy named Paul Boyd, a sediment engineer at the Corps of Engineers, made a point to me that the Clean Water Act, I think was 73, that Clean Water Act essentially declared sediment a pollutant. He basically implied that’s a misunderstanding of what rivers are really like. Because in the 70s, all the water coming over the spillways of these dams was clear, unnaturally so. And so clear water was declared pollutant free. And there’s even a language in the Clean Water Act.
I forget, some parts per million per milligram or something of sediment. And beyond that number, it’s considered pollution. And that standard is basically clear water. Which is not natural on any of these rivers. You know, it’s natural some places, but not here, not in the Mississippi or the Missouri or any of these Western rivers. And so, again, there’s this fundamental flaw in the way we think about the river that was an assumption that was made, a mistake that was made decades ago that’s hindering efforts now to be smart, you know, to be prepared to manage things better.
And that’s great.
Ross Kenyon: That’s one of those things about policy that scares me is that there will be something that will be put into law like that. We will recognize it’s a mistake and it will still not be fixed. And expectations have been built around the fact that sediment is considered a pollutant, according to the Clean Water Act. And because expectations have been built around that, there are stakeholders who depend upon its continuity. And you’re like, this is not right, but it’s going to continue. What do we do now?
It kind of hurts me to think about that too much.
Tyler J. Kelley: No, I don’t have the answer. And I’m sure you’re right. Like, I’m sure if you were to repeal that portion of the act, some other entities would be upset. They would lose. They would suffer. And you’d have to sort of balance that if you are a policymaker, which thank goodness I’m not.
Ross Kenyon: Thank goodness I’m not either. It’s more than I could, my heart can stand. Well, what do you think of something like the Delta works on the, I assume it’s the Rotter, because it’s Rotterdam, right? It’s the Rhine and the Meuse Rivers are the major rivers of Holland. Why not Rhine Dam? I guess because Amsterdam is Amstel Dam. It’s the river Amstel.
Tyler J. Kelley: I don’t know. I’ve never proposed to decipher the Dutch language. I don’t understand how they combine all those words together. Interview over. That’s what I had you here for Dutch philology. There’s a, I’ll butcher the pronunciation, but I think it’s the Reichswaterstaat. It’s the Dutch Army Corps of Engineers. They’re brilliant people. And you got to get one of them on here to explain things. I sort of corresponded with one guy from there for my book, but it’s fascinating the stuff they’re doing there, obviously.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, no, it’s amazing. But I’m wondering if this is a case of would you... So for those listening who do not know, Rotterdam, yeah, formerly the busiest port in the world before East Asia took off and became the busiest ones. But certainly Europe’s biggest port is... But as you know about the Netherlands, Netherlands is famously a country of dikes and levees and being underwater and reclaiming land. But this Delta Works is surely the most sophisticated Delta project anti flooding control measures in the world. Is this an act of a horrible hubris?
Or is this like where we should be headed? Should they also be considering a managed retreat? Or is this a good thing?
Tyler J. Kelley: I don’t want to put a word like a good or bad on it. I think the Dutch are more clear eyed about the risks that are up ahead than anyone else. So they’ve decided what their priorities are, what land they want to protect, what land they’re willing to give back. And they’re doing what’s necessary to hold that line. And I think they have better chance of success than anyone else. They’ve looked at, you know, flood risk and storm surge risk out to 20%. 2,200, 180 years in the future.
That’s how they’re thinking about it. They’re like, what do we need to do to be protected for the next 200 years? So again, they’ve built some massive, fantastic, humongous structures, but they’ve also done some retreating. They’ve moved People out of areas, they’ve set their levees back. They’ve reduced risk by this project called Room for the River. I think it’s 34 homes removed. I think hundreds and hundreds of acres of land were given back to the river. Some places, they’re actually digging deeper auxiliary channels.
They’re actually cutting the land away to let the river fill that degraded land. Again, that reduces the risk because you give the river more space. I think Fascinatingly, after Katrina, that’s what everyone tells the story. Katrina was sort of the light bulb over the head moment for the Dutch that, hey, just sort of building taller and taller walls is not going to work. And that’s what prompted them to reevaluate their whole sort of flood control philosophy. And they commissioned this new Delta plan, this new Delta commission to study all of this stuff over again, look at climate change, look at the risk.
Again, this is 2005, Katrina. So I think the report came back in 2008, and then they started executing it. Since, you know, since 2008, they have been working on this plan, looking at all this increased risk going up to 2200 and what they can do about it. And some of it is retreating. Some of it is taking levies down and they’re doing that, too. So I think they have a fascinating mixture of, you know, build the biggest, baddest structures on the planet. And they’ve got, again, we talk about risk in the United States.
We talk about the 100 year flood or the 100 year storm, you know, the 200, 300, 500 year storm. So they’ve got protection that’s 10,000 years. Meaning the event that would flow over that structure, that levy, has a 1 in 10,000 chance of occurring in any given year. Whereas the new system that the Army Corps of Engineers built on New Orleans is 100 year at best because it’s sinking. So we spent $14 billion giving New Orleans 100 year protection at best. The Dutch are looking at 10,000 to 1,250 year.
1,200 is like the lowest they go. And the really important settlements, which are right on the sort of North Sea front there, like Rotterdam, have 10,000 years. So they’ve thought about this stuff. They’ve spent the money. They’ve built what they need to build. So I guess I see a combination of retreating and fortifying. That’s sort of the way I put it for the United States as a sort of a key to continuing our way of life in this wetter world. And the Dutch are doing it, and we’re not really doing it.
Ross Kenyon: And there’s so many stories in your book about infrastructure that could be well funded and improved and is in fact probably important to fund and should have been funded maybe decades ago. All the stories about the various locks that control traffic on the river. Why can’t this get the money that it needs? It seems like a major fragile bottleneck that could break at any time and cause a lot of hardship. And then there are things like this too, where the discount rate is so extreme that we’re not able to project far enough in the future.
And it just seems that it’s half measures constantly and fixing with duct tape. What is it about our politics versus the Dutch that is preventing us from doing that?
Tyler J. Kelley: I mean, I shouldn’t speak too much about the Dutch politics because I don’t really... I don’t really know, but just sort of the cursory glance I gave at it at the end of the book, you know, I think they have a much more centralized government and a much longer tradition of sort of communal, you know, give and take decision making that we don’t have. But I think I pointed this anecdote at the end of the book, a place called Lafourche Parish, South Lafourche Parish. It’s way down on a coast in Louisiana, west of New Orleans.
And so I think sort of the Lafourche Parish example for me is sort of the American way we can do this. And what happened there is, again, Louisiana has been sinking and sinking. And so they’ve been facing these risks since the 60s, 70s. They’ve seen their land disappear. And so they knew South Lafourche. In the 60s that, okay, you know, we’ve had to retreat from this bear island, we’ve had to retreat from this town that was, you know, a little bit closer, a little bit further from the Gulf, and now we’re here.
And we can afford to build our levy around these four towns. And so let’s do it. And they raised some money, they got some federal money, and they built that levy. So they, you know, they made the stand. And they said, you know, you guys over here, we can’t afford to protect you. You know, these houses are abandoned. This town is abandoned. And the gentleman I spoke with there, Wendell Curell, you know, his grandparents had already fled from one barrier island, fled from this other town, Leeville.
And so when, you know, he was involved in setting this levy system up and he manages it now. He’s personally given up two locations his family has lived in, let him go to the ocean, to the storm surge. I think Chenier Caminata is completely gone, and Leeville is just a collection of still camps and fishing processing places and boat ramps now. The interesting thing, though, I think is that It wasn’t, you know, I think the federal government was involved in this, but it was really a local effort.
The community, you know, not too narrowly defined, but not too broadly defined, decided we... Want to protect this area. This is what we’ve decided. This is what we can afford. And then after Katrina, like everybody, they wanted to raise the level of their protection. They want to build their levies up. And so they raised their taxes voluntarily twice. And they said, OK, this is as much money as we can raise. So this is as high as we can build it. Yeah, it’d be better if we built it higher.
But we can’t afford that. So we’re going to be able to be so protected. And this is enough for us. And we can keep living here. But again, they know the risk. They’re aware of the risk. It’s very present to them, the risk. What Wendell said to me is when they first built this levee system, what they do is actually put a gate in front of the bayou, which is just a sluggish stream at that point, because otherwise, the storm surge will come up the bayou and flood into the house.
The bayou is like a narrow river. When the system was first finished in the 80s, he would close the gates, meaning the water outside the bayou is high enough to start coming into homes and they didn’t want it in. They closed the gates 20 times a year in the 80s. Now in 2018, they closed at 250 days a year. So that’s how much the land has sunk. That’s how much the sea has risen. So if they hadn’t built this system when they built it and raised it when they raised it, The whole area would be uninhabitable.
The water above average high tide would be water in people’s homes. No one would be able to live there. So I think that’s an example of constituting a sense of the public good Confront the holdouts because, you know, not everyone wanted to give up land to build the new levy. Some people sued, they had to go to court. But again, after Katrina, Louisiana passed state laws that classified hurricane protection and flood protection as public goods, qualifying for eminent domain. So the law was sort of on the side of building these structures, saying we need to create protection.
They voluntarily raised their taxes, they paid their own money for it, a lot of their own money for it. Again, this is a place that voted for Trump by 60 percentage points over Biden in 2020. So it’s not about politics. And I don’t think it even matters if you believe in climate change or not, because for these people in this place, the risk was present, clear and present. It was existential. So you sort of spend more and you get less in return, but the alternative is to leave.
And that’s a pretty simple question that communities can answer, no matter what they believe in or who they vote for.
Ross Kenyon: Kind of optimistic. More optimistic perhaps than the rest of the show. But maybe a good model for us to look toward. Tyler, if someone wanted to follow your work, what do you think is the best way for them to do so? Obviously, you want them to buy your book.
Tyler J. Kelley: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think everything we’ve been talking about and a lot, lot more is in Holding Back the River. It’s available on Amazon from the publisher, Avid Reader Press, and Simon & Schuster. And it’s a lot of local bookstores too. Other than that, I have a website, tylerjkelly.com. It’s not very active. So probably buying the book is about all you can do.
Ross Kenyon: Link is in the show notes if you’d like to do so. And please do. I really liked it. I thought it was a well-written book. It kept me engaged. For a book that is ostensibly about a boring topic, kind of like locks and dams and things that we all take for granted, I found myself really engrossed by it. So kudos on a well-written book, Tyler.
Tyler J. Kelley: Thank you so much. I worked really hard on that. And I hope that it’ll appeal to It’s designed to be a book that someone who isn’t interested in stuff can pick up and be interested in, even if you don’t care about policy and flooding and all these things. So that was my goal as a writer, trying to write for that type of audience. So hopefully I’ve succeeded.
Ross Kenyon: I think you were successful at it. I like that there’s both a strong engineering fascination of these gigantic construction projects and also really strong humane focus on how this actually affects people living there. So I thought it was a nice balance. I can keep flattering if you’d like. I’m sure your listeners are getting bored of it, so we should probably give them a break. All right, cool. We can wrap it up. Well, thanks so much for listening. If you like the show, please give us a great rating and review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts.
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