The Wisdom of Many

A great article in the Baltimore Sun appeared shortly after the second major flood in as many years devastated the Maryland town of Ellicott City (see earlier posts).  The article included a few excellent quotes I wanted to highlight here:

The article described the engineering proposals made following the 2016 flood, saying that  

"about $35 million in immediate improvements were needed, including $13 million to build three large ponds to catch rainwater before it floods Main Street and sweeps away people, cars and businesses."  The engineers also "recommended a couple of options: drilling two tunnels, called bores, through the town’s hills at a cost of more than $60 million to redirect water away from downtown, or building 18 stormwater management projects that would cost about $85 million.... But most of the projects were still in the planning stage when tragedy struck again last Sunday."

Which brings me to the quotes:

“We had an emergency and it needed to be treated as such... I’m not an engineer. I can’t tell you how much they needed to spend. But they needed to do more than they did. They didn’t do much. They fixed a wall. That’s it.”

--Kara Brook Brown, property owner on Main Street

“When you deal with these issues, you can’t build them in a month.  You can’t build them in a year. It takes 10 years or more to get some of these things done. … Who would have ever imagined we’d have a worse flood two years later?”

--County Executive Alan Kittleman

“I’m here to try to do something to save the town I love, the town I grew up in. I don’t want to see a ghost town. All we can do is stop building, and find a way to redirect the water so the town doesn’t get ruined. It’s been here longer than any of this and it deserves to stay.”

--Life-long resident Dave Mullen, while holding a hand-written sign that says: “No New Development. U R Ruining History.”
  
"Officials owe Ellicott City some answers. That’s what government is there to do: Solve big problems that are not going to be solved by the market. The market has been a big contributor to this problem.”

--Roger E. Hartley, dean of the University of Baltimore’s College of Public Affairs

“Everybody thought the flood of 2016 was a freak storm and we all thought we had time.  Now, she says, it no longer appears to be a freak storm, but a combination of changing weather patterns and overdevelopment. We can’t fathom rebuilding. I cannot get up and ask people to throw more good money after bad.”

--Gretchen Shuey, owner of the Bean Hollow on Main Street, who plans to move her business to nearby Catonsville

“I recognize Ellicott City means a lot to the community.  But we human beings have irretrievably altered the natural world both in terms of climate change and the upstream development. Main Street is now a flood control channel. You have to ask yourself: Maybe we need to rethink what we’re doing with old town Ellicott City.

"Mother Nature is saying, ‘Can you hear me now?’ “Sometimes we think we can engineer our way out of problems. I can’t imagine a culvert big enough to handle the flows we saw Sunday. Very few cities have integrated climate change into their planning.  I worry there’s this false bravado and machismo that we’re going to bounce back. We reopened faster than we expected, and now look what’s happened. There needs to be a reality check. 

"To me it’s hubris to say, ‘We’re going to do what we’ve done before and rebuild and take our chances with Mother Nature.’”

--Tim Lattimer, a former acting director of the Office of Global Change in the federal Bureau of Oceans, Environment and Science; and local county resident

Photo source (link)