Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 25, 1990                   TAG: 9003252026
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: ATLANTA                                LENGTH: Medium

FLOOD-CONTROL SAFETY IN DOUBT

The flooding in Elba and throughout much of Alabama, Florida and Georgia killed 11 people and caused untold millions of dollars in property damage.

Its underlying message, however, may have been that the nation's aging dams and levees may not provide the protection Americans have come to expect.

At the least, experts say the nation's 80,000 major dams and levees will cost more and more to maintain.

And some experts complain that some large flood-control projects are as much a product of politics as of physical necessity.

For three decades, planners, environmentalists and government agencies have tried to limit development in flood-prone areas.

Yet during that time, according to one government study, the percentage of dwellings in those areas increased 40 percent.

The federal government has spent $20 billion on dams and levees in this century.

In the past decade, the cost of annual flood damage ranged from $.5 billion to $6 billion, the nation's costliest natural hazard.

"It becomes a bigger issue all the time, because there's just so much more property at risk," said William Riebsame, director of the University of Colorado National Hazard Center, which studies human responses to natural hazards.

On one level, what happened in Elba was simply an unpredictable disastrous act of nature.

The Works Progress Administration built the levees in 1938 after a flood in 1929 inundated the town.

With so many flood-control projects more than 40 years old, experts say, the problems are twofold.

Older dams, built when flood baselines were less accurate than today's, may be potentially unreliable.

More important, aging dams need more maintenance.

"You've got all these 50- to 100-year-old dams, and a lot of them are in bad, bad shape," said Larry Larson, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers.

Some critics say that the government has contributed to flood damage by subsidizing unwise development.

Moreover, they contend that the redirection of rivers and the destruction of wetlands accompanying many water projects have worsened flooding by removing many natural brakes.

"Our nation's flood-damage bill continues to grow because we're still financing a pork barrel system where we're encouraging disaster by building structures that lull people into a false sense of security," said Brent Blackwelder, vice president of the Friends of the Earth Foundation, an environmental group, in Washington.

Yet ever since the first levee was built in low-lying New Orleans in 1727, much of the South's growth, particularly that of the Mississippi River Valley, has depended on flood-control projects.

"If you go way back, people settled along the rivers, where the transportation system was," said Carol S. Todd, a spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers in Washington.

Unresolved is the issue of how to regulate growth.

For decades, critics of huge water projects have called for alternatives to flood control - limits on building on flood plains, for example, and construction standards that include the possibility of flooding.

Some experts credit the Army Corps of Engineers and other water-project agencies with finally moving in that direction.