Mitch Smith and John Schwartz

As Mayor Frank Klipsch of Davenport starts that conversation — a wide-ranging discussion of upstream levee heights, riverfront development and whether the city should install permanent flood protection — there is one topic he sees little benefit in raising: human-caused climate change.

“We know there’s something going on, so how do we come together and deal with that?” said Klipsch, a two-term mayor who said taking a stance on climate change could be “divisive.” “Let’s not try to label it. Let’s not try to politicize it. It’s just a matter of something is changing.”

Across the Midwest this spring, floods have submerged farms and stores, split open levees and, in some places, left people stranded for days or weeks. The disasters have renewed national attention on how climate change can exacerbate flooding and how cities can prepare for a future with more extreme weather. But in some of the hardest-hit areas, where bolstering flood protection and helping the displaced are popular bipartisan causes, there is little appetite for bringing climate change — and the political baggage it carries — into the discussion.

“I don’t see a purpose at this point to create a challenge, a straw man to argue about, when in reality we all know what the ultimate results are,” said Klipsch, who does not belong to a political party.

For decades, Davenport, the third-biggest city in Iowa, has taken an idiosyncratic approach to staying dry. Instead of building massive flood walls and towering levees, which protect most large cities on the Mississippi but worsen the downstream flood risk, it has embraced its proximity to the river, earning praise from environmental groups. Miles of the city’s riverfront parkland are consumed when the Mississippi rises, and when it threatens downtown businesses, city crews erect temporary barriers. Ever since the flood of 1993, the plan had worked.

But in recent years, as downtown Davenport boomed — warehouse buildings with waterfront views became upscale condos, trendy shops and new restaurants — the river seemed to grow fiercer. The temporary flood barriers became a regular feature. And when the Mississippi rose yet again this spring, it lingered on the city’s doorstep for more than a month.

Finally, on April 30, a barrier split open, and the turbid water consumed several blocks of downtown with a force that several people described as tsunami-like. Nobody was hurt, but firefighters rescued dozens of people. Cars were swallowed by the river.

As the water has receded, and as business owners don muck boots to salvage what they can, some have begun to consider how Davenport moves forward. Klipsch has announced plans for a task force. The possibility of a permanent flood wall has been discussed, though few seem enthusiastic about the idea. Others have suggested a middle ground, with more robust protections but not a levee or wall that would block the river view.

“We have to think about what the next 20 years look like and be cognizant that this 100-year flood might be happening more than once every hundred years,” said Paul Rumler, the chief executive of the local chamber of commerce, who also did not want to wade into a climate change debate.

“I’m going to say this,” he continued, “and I’m going to be meaningful in the words: The weather pattern is changing, and we need to be cognizant of those changes.”

Floods have happened throughout history, and they have a complex cocktail of causes. In interviews with nine local officeholders in places where the Mississippi River crested recently, several politicians said they believed climate change was playing a role in the frequency of floods. Others were openly skeptical or declined to take a position.

Across those lines, officials said climate change was a politically risky topic that they generally avoided discussing — and that they considered less relevant to the flooding than levee heights, changes in river management and other factors.

But as the planet warms, scientists say the heavy rains in the Midwest that contributed to this year’s devastation will become more common.

Kenneth E. Kunkel, a climate researcher at North Carolina State University, said humans’ role in climate change could likely be seen in this year’s heavy precipitation from the amount of water vapor in the air, which can be attributed to warmer surface area temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere. Kunkel said the continued burning of fossil fuels was likely to increase the risk of such heavy rain in the future.

“When a weather system occurs that is capable of producing heavy precipitation,” Kunkel said, “it is virtually certain that in the future such systems will produce heavier precipitation.”

In places like Davenport, where floods are a troubling reality and not an abstract concept, debating water vapor levels can seem impertinent, even if most people accept the clear scientific consensus that climate change is happening.

A 2018 poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that about two-thirds of adults in Davenport’s metro area thought climate change was real, and a smaller majority thought it was caused by humans. But along the river, the focus is on practical steps to curb the floods, which everyone can support, not discussing climate change, which can expose partisan friction.

“Too many people have to hem and haw around it because of their political affiliations and how they get elected,” said Phil Stang, the mayor of Kimmswick, Missouri, who lives near the Mississippi. But climate change, he said, is “absolutely real.”

Though Stang is happy to discuss climate change when asked, he said he sees little need to bring it up in Kimmswick. He said he could not recall the topic being mentioned at a board of aldermen meeting, and does not often hear about it from constituents. Other riverfront mayors said much the same.

“It’s not sensitive so much as it just isn’t a part of the conversation,” said Mayor Jo Anne Smiley of Clarksville, Missouri, where the Mississippi River now floods on a near-annual basis.

Smiley, a Republican, said she believes “climate change affects everything.” But the main topic in her small city, where filling sandbags is a grim ritual and the frequent floods have scared away some businesses, is getting money for a flood barrier, not debating climate change.

“In their own language, they’re talking about it,” Smiley said, referring to nearby farmers who have seen their growing cycles disrupted. “It’s just not the same language you would hear if you were in Paris at the meetings” attended by world leaders to discuss climate change.

Others take a more direct approach. In flood-prone Louisiana, Missouri, Mayor Marvin Brown, a forester by profession, gave a presentation to the local Rotary Club about the scientific evidence for climate change. “Nobody seemed anxious to deny that it was happening,” he said.

Not talking about climate change in frank terms can carry risk, said Louis Gritzo, vice president for research at the insurance company FM Global, which advises clients, including large corporations, about the hazards that climate change will bring. Gritzo warned of an “uncertainty trap,” in which leaders avoid talking about climate change, do not take action and expose themselves to more dire consequences in the future.

“I can understand that reticence to jump into it,” Gritzo said. But “if you don’t at least give it consideration, or understand that it’s headed in that direction, it’s always going to be a responsive action.”

Larry Weber, a founder of the Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa, often travels to parts of his state devastated by flooding. When people he is advising dispute climate change, he says he refuses “to go down that rabbit hole” and instead focuses on ways to help with their problems.

“Climate change is real, and I’m not going to argue about that with you,” Weber recalled saying at one recent meeting in a small Iowa town. “What we’re going to work on is solutions to this particular situation here.”

That approach appears to have resonance in Iowa, a politically mixed state where many cities have been overwhelmed by floods this spring, and where being protected from the next flood is a higher priority than discussing the cause of the last one.

Klipsch, the Davenport mayor, said he saw little value in debating the reasons for what he called “weather-related challenges.” But he said it was still possible to recognize the changes in the river, to understand that those changes may continue, and to take action to protect the city and the environment.

“No matter what you want to call it,” he said, “I need all hands on deck to respond.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="df339be0-ba14-3a1d-a694-c772d33a6758" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/us/midwest-flooding-climate-change.html">The New York Times</a>.

In Flood-Hit Midwest, Mayors See Climate Change as a Subject Best Avoided

DAVENPORT, Iowa — The Mississippi River, which gushed into downtown Davenport at record levels two weeks ago, has finally retreated toward its banks. Left behind: A truck-size hole in the temporary flood barrier, dead fish on mud-caked Pershing Avenue, and an urgent conversation about how to shield the city from the next flood.

In flood-hit Midwest, mayors see climate change as a subject best avoided

With dozens of costly breaks across Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and nearby states, the surging waters have left large areas without even cursory flood protection.

“Breaches everywhere: multiple, multiple breaches,” said Tom Bullock, the top elected official in Holt County, Missouri, where crews were rushing last week to patch a leaking levee that, if it failed completely, would flood the small town of Fortescue.

And with the fear of more floods in the coming years — and perhaps even the coming weeks — many people said living and farming near the water might not be viable much longer without major changes.

“We can’t keep this up and make a living,” Michael Peters, who grows corn and soybeans on fertile bottomland in northwest Missouri, said last week after trying to find a path to his submerged farm in a motorboat.

On the river-specked Midwestern prairie, the thousands of miles of levees are an insurance policy against nature’s whims that, at their best, keep cropland and towns dry, floodwaters at bay and the agriculture-driven economy churning. But the levees are aging, subject to uneven regulation and, in many cases, never designed to withstand the river levels seen in the last decade.

The recent flooding — which has devastated farms, roads and Native American reservations — has pushed to the foreground a debate that has raged quietly for generations. It boils down to this: How should the rivers be controlled, who should make those decisions and how much protection should be given to those most vulnerable?

Many of the levees, usually earthen and topped with grass, were built by farmers decades ago and are now managed by a patchwork of local government agencies known as levee districts that often do not coordinate or even follow the same rules. With increased flooding in the past few years, the levees are being tested more frequently than ever before, straining the finances and expertise of some of those districts.

The levee situation has become so grave that the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country’s levee system a D grade in 2017, suggesting $80 billion in investment over 10 years.

“When the next one comes along bigger, they either fail or are overtopped again,” said Nicholas Pinter, an expert on rivers and flooding at the University of California, Davis.

According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees infrastructure on the Missouri River and some of its tributaries, at least 62 levees had been breached or overtopped in the Midwest in March, and hundreds of miles of levees had sustained damage.

“When they run water over the top of them, there’s not anything you can do,” said Pat Sheldon, president of a rural levee district in southwest Iowa that was still paying off repairs from the 2011 flood. This time, Sheldon said, the damage to the levees was much worse, perhaps in the hundreds of millions of dollars. “It’s terrible,” said Sheldon, whose farm was also cut off by the water.

In Missouri, Bullock pointed out a levee that last week had been split open and consumed by the river. A large log swirled in the water near where the earthen berm should have been. “I don’t know what we’re going to do this time,” he said.

The Army Corps of Engineers, which helps determine water levels by operating a series of dams on the Missouri River, tries to balance the needs of many who use the rivers it manages, including farmers, barge shippers, endangered animal species and people who use the water for recreation. Those interests are sometimes at odds, and have been the subject of decades of litigation. Corps officials say they are not allowed to change the congressionally authorized purposes of the reservoirs, though they had been most focused on limiting floods for the past year.

“The Corps’s No. 1 priority in its operations is life safety,” said Maj. Gen. Scott A. Spellmon, the Corps’s deputy commanding general for civil and emergency operations, in a statement. “Our current focus is to protect life, mitigate risks to flooding events and repair damages due to the recent events in the basin.”

In places like Holt County, where the floods keep coming and the levees keep breaking, there is little patience for the Corps’s approach. Last year, landowners from four Midwestern states won a lawsuit against the agency that claimed the repeated floods amounted to a seizure of their property.

“We’re ground zero: We get the full shot,” said Roger Ideker, whose family owns farmland in Holt County along the banks of the Missouri River and was the lead plaintiff in that lawsuit.

This week, the closest Ideker could get to his land was a two-lane road a few miles away that was now functioning as a boat ramp. Buildings in the small town of Corning were visible half-submerged in the distance.

“Our levees are big and they’re good,” Ideker said, but they were no match for this new normal. “Every event seems like it’s higher. It’s higher water. You build the levee higher. And the next time you build it higher. You can’t keep up with it.”

The situation has been exacerbated by wetter rainstorms, which are expected to worsen over time and have been attributed to climate change.

“There are layers that come together when big events like this happen — it’s never just one thing,” said Barbara Mayes Boustead, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service who contributed to a 2018 federal report on climate change.

Tom Waters, chairman of the Missouri Levee and Drainage District Association, which advocates for landowners and others along the rivers, called for easing federal regulations and building bigger flood protection in rural areas.

“We’re seeing more water in the river, but we haven’t improved the infrastructure,” said Waters, who farms along the Missouri River east of Kansas City, Missouri. “Basically, when it comes to levees and flood control protection, we’re still driving on gravel roads and we’re trying to handle interstate traffic.”

But building ever-higher levees is not a panacea: Keeping water out of one area only means it will go somewhere else.

In the early 20th century, the Army Corps of Engineers and towns along the Mississippi River followed a “levees only” policy that meant building higher and higher walls, leaving the river no way to release its power. That strategy failed spectacularly in the Great Flood of 1927, which inundated 27,000 square miles and displaced 1 million people. In the aftermath, officials built a more complex Mississippi River system that included a network of spillways and flood ways, as well as other tools, along with the levees.

In the areas hardest hit this past month, where levees are shredded and livelihoods shattered, many blame the Corps. In recent weeks, politicians from some of the flooded states have become vocal critics of the river management plan and called for the prioritization of flood control.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said in a statement that the Corps was “hamstrung” by “radical environmentalist lobbyists that are forcing the agency to prioritize wildlife over farmers.” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, cited the town of Hamburg in his state, which staved off the river in 2011 by bolstering its levee but flooded this year after trying and failing to keep its increased protection.

“The No. 1 priority of the Corps should be flood control — flood control, period,” Grassley said on the Senate floor.

The devastation to the levees has left much of the Midwest with nothing to hold back the waters from even a relatively minor flood, which forecasters have warned is possible in the weeks ahead.

“If we have a wet spring,” Gov. Mike Parson of Missouri said, “this problem is going to get worse, and in that process we’re not going to have time probably to repair these levees.”

As water recedes, at least for the moment, and the conversation shifts to recovery, many in the river bottom said they planned to stay and rebuild, hopeful that policies might change. Others said these levee breaks were probably their last.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be here,” said Rhonda Hunziger, the mayor of Craig, Missouri, population 230, where residents piled sandbags through the night in a spirited but futile attempt to save their town from the Missouri River after surrounding levees burst.

Depending on what the insurance company decided, Hunziger said this could be the flood that forced her to higher ground. “I have lived with floods my whole life,” she said while staring out at the brown-hued water covering her nearly empty town. “And I am about ready to get off the bottom.”

'Breaches Everywhere': Flooding Bursts Midwest Levees, and Tough Questions Follow

CORNING, Mo. — The widespread, severe flooding in the Midwest over the last month has exposed the vulnerabilities in a levee system that is now so full of holes that many here ruefully describe it as “Swiss cheese.”

'Breaches everywhere': Flooding bursts midwest levees, and tough questions follow

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Mitch Smith and John Schwartz

Articles written by the author

In flood-hit Midwest, mayors see climate change as a subject best avoided

'Breaches everywhere': Flooding bursts midwest levees, and tough questions follow