Major urban centers like Sacramento, like Los Angeles, remain protected only at the margin. Engineers and scientists have got to be fully involved in this decision process, this political process.
Many of the recommendations went into the 'too hard' box and floated in a bureaucratic malaise until the memory of the flood faded away.
The half-life of the memory of a flood is very short. You can already hear it in Washington, D.C.: New Orleans where?
Communities around the country continue to be at risk.
The very fact that we don't know how vulnerable we are to floods across this country ought to be worrisome, ... We need to find that out and then act to do something about it.
We said if you don't need to develop in a flood plain, don't do it, ... We had top talent working on that report, a bunch of very smart people.
That's a lot of territory. Never has the damage been so great. The question is, are the people going to come back? I don't think anybody really knows.
In spite of 70 years of federal flood control efforts and nearly 40 years of federal flood insurance, the costs of flooding continue to rise and there is no federal policy to provide direction for future actions.
It gives scant attention to environment and social costs of the kind we saw in the eyes of the displaced families.
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