In the aftermath of the floods that have recently ravaged Dane County, the community needs to take action.
In the most immediate sense, the community has already taken heroic levels of action. Volunteers answered the call to fill and place sandbags throughout Monona and Madison and friends and family have helped folks from the hardest-hit places like Mazomanie find comfort and community. Even drivers have generally been nicer and more accommodating as East Washington Avenue and Willy Street have become parking lots during the morning commute.
All of that stuff is important. In a time when the world seems really, really dark, there are few things more affirming than watching your community come together in a crisis. But as the waters recede and clean-up gets underway, this energy has to be applied towards a series of major policy changes — changes that would help prevent future floods that could be even more devastating than what we’ve just experienced.
First and foremost, we’ve got to lower the level of Lake Mendota. The lake has been kept artificially high for decades, in large part to make sure the owners of the biggest speed boats can go zipping around the lake and so that waterfront property owners have an easier time maintaining their docks. It’s the county’s gift to the wealthy but they aren’t the ones who will feel the cost of flooding the most. As so often happens, a public subsidy to the wealthy becomes a tax on the middle class and poor.
This action is long overdue. Isthmus published a column 11 years ago warning about the flood risk from an artificially elevated Lake Mendota. This has been public knowledge since Wii Sports was the hot new video game. For years, researchers from the University of Wisconsin have had hydrological models showing that a single storm could make Lake Mendota overflow. Steven Verburg of the Wisconsin State Journal wrote a story showing how climate and policy changes create the potential for catastrophic flooding. Verburg’s story ran only four weeks ago.
The warnings were many but were still ignored. We cannot let this happen again. Dane County officials are the ones responsible for the level of Lake Mendota. They need to take steps immediately to create policy that will lower the summer level of the lake.
Lowering Lake Mendota is a crucial policy goal but it is not the only one. For the last eight years, state government, under Gov. Scott Walker, has stripped environmental protections at every level. The Department of Natural Resources has become a rubber stamp for business interests, utterly abandoning the agency’s historic role as a caretaker for the environmental resources we all depend on.
One particularly egregious way state policy is making this worse involves regulations around runoff. Property developers are replacing rain-soaking green space with asphalt, which means that more water becomes runoff and flows into our lakes. But the county is now powerless to stop it. This year, Walker signed a bill forbidding local governments from adopting stronger runoff standards than the state. Over the weekend, Walker stopped for a photo-op at Tenney Park to fill some sandbags. I’m glad he picked up a shovel, but it doesn’t come anywhere near undoing the damage he did with a signature.
We need to restore the balance between environmental protection and the short-term gains of private industry. Luckily, Wisconsinites have a chance to restore some balance on Election Day in November.
Finally, we need to recognize that man-made climate change is real. As the folks from the UW Center for Limnology noted in a blog post, we can’t say that any one storm series — including what we’ve experienced over the last week — is a result of climate change. However, when you look at lots and lots of climate data, it is clear that our climate is getting hotter and wetter and that we are experiencing more extreme storms on a more frequent basis.
Over the last decade, we’ve seen massive floods across the Midwest. This very week, the La Crosse area has also had to deal with flash floods and evacuations. Our continued inaction on climate change is only going to make these storms costlier and deadlier.
I’m glad everyone decided to ban straws but it is going to take more than that. We need committed and dedicated action — on the local, state, federal and international level — to limit man-made climate change.
None of these policy changes will be easy. But with a price tag for local storm damage already topping more than $100 million in a single week, they are absolutely necessary.
And, if nothing else, let’s stop listening to the speed boat people and lower the lake already.
Alan Talaga co-writes the Off the Square cartoon with Jon Lyons.
