Re: OT-- N. Orleans insurance

Posted by Matt from CT on September 17, 2005 at 18:29:44 from (66.181.93.142):

In Reply to: Re: OT-- N. Orleans insurance posted by bo on September 17, 2005 at 17:12:42:

You'd be surprised bo...Northeast has much more than just snow :) New England anyway

(Although I can't stand it when they look for Federal Aid just because it was an unusually big snow storm...It snows here, live with it!)

'38 Hurricane that hit us still ranks in the top 10 in lives lost. City I work in had 94 fatalities from the '53 Worcester Tornado. And I live in an area that's protected by a large series of Corps of Engineers dams so that dozens and dozens of mill villages and small cities remained economically viable after the severe flood hazard they were at became realized.*

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Ok, one final aside before bed...

Many of those villages it may not have been unreasonable to build originally. Many started in the 1830s, in communities dating to the early 1700s.

One might argue there wasn't a lot of historical knowledge of floods yet...BUT --

One of this summer's reads was Man & Nature, written by George Perkins Marsh in 1862 <-- Yes, 1862 as in Civil War time.

And one of his observations from then in New England was increasingly worse flooding caused by poor farming practice -- not only where hills being denuded to low-value farming reducing the forest cover to slow the run-off...the soils being lost where silting up the rivers and raising the river beds.

Adding my own interpretation to the "big picture" you get this:

The biggest reason for the mass push cutting down the forests where to grow more sheep for the Mills that were built, and provide fuel for the railroads that ran to the Mills. And losing forests and losing soil as side effects of needing wool and fuel...caused the villages to become much more likely to flood.

Prior to the "great Merino Wool Craze" in the 1830s, New England farms tended necessarily to rotate -- they'd clear new land for crops, when fertility declined they'd move on and the old land would re-forest and re-cover. With sheep, you didn't need manpower to tend the fields...cut all the trees down (railroads made a market for the wood), grow sheep. Before Mills, Sheep, and Railroads you had maybe 10-20 out of every 200 acres in use for farmland at a time. After the 1830s any where you could clear trees was put into marginal production.

Which is all to say...some of these communities, whether in New England or on the Mississippi or elsewhere may have not be that all unreasonable in regards to flooding when they were built, but the unintended consequences of later developments made them much more vulnerable.

Follow Ups:

• Re: OT-- N. Orleans insurance ntmcj 19:39:36 09/17/05 (1)
  • Re: OT-- N. Orleans insurance bo 19:49:50 09/17/05 (0)
• Re: OT-- N. Orleans insurance bo 18:44:42 09/17/05 (0)

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