"They're trying to wash us away."--singer-composer Randy Newman's lamentation for Louisiana in the 1974 anthem "Louisiana 1927" about the great Mississippi River flood.
In that song, Randy Newman offers a fictional account of then-President Calvin Coolidge coming to Louisiana on a train accompanied by a "little fat man." Coolidge is said in a lyric to have looked around and remarked, "Isn't it a shame what the river has done to this poor cracker's land?"
Nearly a century later our flood-control devices are much more sophisticated. Our political sensitivities, at least to disasters, are a little more refined, although it's true that Donald Trump threatens all manner of advancement and that he playfully threw rolls of paper towels at poor, powerless, hurricane-devastated Puerto Ricans.
But Gov. Asa Hutchinson asked in this paper Sunday whether it was right--or at least ideal--that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Tulsa deployed flood-control systems and procedures on the Arkansas River in Oklahoma to spare greater flooding in that state and effectively flush raging waters into Arkansas.
The Corps of Engineers did just that, on the basis that the flood about to happen is the one to avert; that the full scale of flooding would have been worse without the action, and that the congressionally approved water plan lays out how to proceed in such situations, and that it was following the law.
The question our governor is asking is whether the recent experience confirms or undermines that law and that process.
Might this experience suggest revisiting such a policy?
I'm sure Hutchinson knows that he needn't argue publicly that this was Oklahoma's problem and should have been borne more greatly by Oklahoma. That would resemble those public pronouncements of prayers to be spared from a tornado and then public thanks to the Lord for answering the prayer when the twister takes life and property somewhere else.
Tornadoes bounce around with sinister minds of their own. But rivers flow in ways we know. Rainfall in Oklahoma will take an inevitable trip on the Arkansas River to the Mississippi River.
In a way--perhaps one nobody near the Arkansas River in Arkansas wants much to hear--a flooding disaster in which river waters rage downstream to wreak havoc miles away demonstrates our interconnectedness, our brotherhood in nature, our shared vulnerability and thus our shared responsibility.
Hutchinson's question is whether the vulnerability and responsibility were sufficiently shared in this case. Might we learn from this experience so that, next time, the Corps could manage the situation in a way that, as Asa says, would provide a nearer "balance?"
Hutchinson said in the article: "The fact is, they're managing the water in Oklahoma for flood control and recreational purposes. Was it managed in the right way to balance the flooding results across Oklahoma and Arkansas?"
In other words, the natural flow of a river is indeed a shared vulnerability and responsibility. But this was a man-managed flow to a great extent. Hutchinson's question is surely something a down-river governor is entitled to ask.
I emailed the governor Sunday to ask for elaboration--to inquire as to exactly what he was suggesting.
Not unexpectedly, he replied to soft-pedal.
"Good question," he replied. "The Corps responded appropriately. [The] Corps of Engineers confirmed there will be an after-action review of its management of the record-level flooding and that the report will be public. That review is important, and that review is what I mentioned to the reporter. With this record level of rainfall in Oklahoma and the consequent flooding, I doubt any current procedures provide sufficient guiding on management rules. The Corps and policymakers will benefit from this review. I am satisfied with this commitment."
In other words--hey, I'm just asking for the future.
I'd predict the eventual report will cite practical problems associated with any idea of letting folks in Oklahoma get flooded by a topped lake today on the explanation that the damage would be less in a couple of weeks for people in Arkansas.
The report probably will say the damage was made less for people in both states by the management system that released only a limited amount of water.
I suspect the report will say the objective is to fend off flooding damage where it's about to happen, and to deal with it later somewhere else when it happens somewhere else, particularly when there is time to warn the folks in Arkansas.
The report will likely say the real issue wasn't the Corps of Engineers' courses of action but the fact that rain fell hard and steadily for days on end in Oklahoma, necessitating controlled releases toward Arkansas, which was itself already saturated by heavy rain.
It may come down the simple fact that somebody has to be down-river when waters rage, like Louisiana in 1927 and Arkansas in 2019.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/18/2019