We should be rethinking value of our wetlands

Occasionally, Mother Nature smacks us upside the head. Hurricane Ivan, on the heels of Hurricane Frances, was one such smack.
Florida seemed sure to take another devastating hit, but the Ohio River Valley seemed reasonably safe. Under ordinary circumstances, that would be the case. But just a week earlier, Frances dropped 3 to 6 inches of rain on the area, an exclamation point to two years of unusually wet weather.
As Ivan moved northward, soils were virtually saturated. There simply was no place for Ivan's rain to go. When he arrived Sept. 17, the forecast was ominous. It poured all day.
How quickly it can occur
When I picked up my daughter after school, we waited for the buses to clear the parking lot. The tiny yardwide stream behind the school suddenly overflowed its banks. In less than 10 minutes, what had just been a parking lot became a muddy, turbulent mess. Water began creeping onto the building's lowest floors.
It turned out that damage to the school was minimal, and my daughter and I got home safely to our ridge-top home. Unfortunately, thousands of people living too close to big streams and rivers didn't fare so well. Wheeling, W.Va., for example, was swamped with more than 9 inches of rain in less than 24 hours. Entire sections of the city were submerged under 5 or 6 feet of water as the Ohio River crested well above flood stage. Recovery time for many will be measured in months.
For days, everyone talked in almost hushed tones of the power of the storm and the overwhelming crush of the water. How could it happen so fast? Under the circumstances, such an event was almost inevitable. Precipitation has been above normal for almost two years, and Frances' visit just a week earlier than Ivan's had saturated the soils.
To understand what happened, try a simple kitchen demonstration to illustrate the land's water-holding ability. Take a sponge about the size of a bar of soap, soak it, then wring it out thoroughly. The sponge represents a piece of dry ground. Set the sponge in a soap dish and slowly pour a trickle of water onto the sponge from a pitcher. You are simulating rainfall. Notice how the sponge absorbs the water and holds it within itself. Under normal conditions, that's what the earth does. But as you continue to pour water on the sponge, it eventually becomes saturated.
When water begins to puddle atop the sponge, stop. The sponge is saturated, just as the earth was saturated before Ivan hit. Now, keep pouring water on the sponge. Almost immediately, the soap dish will overflow and gravity will pull the water to low ground, just as rain runs to valleys and low-lying areas. Even downstream areas that receive little or no rainfall flood as the runoff flows inexorably in that direction.
Thus, we have devastating floods. Those who live near streams and rivers take the hardest hit.
Benefits of wetlands
The simple way to avoid floods is live and work on high ground. That's why we have environmental regulations that protect wetlands and limit development in the flood plain. Land developers find these regulations particularly bothersome because floods are relatively rare events.
But wetlands' greatest value is their ability to control floods. They are the earth's natural sponges. They can absorb massive amounts of water that would otherwise flow wildly downstream. The more we pave over cities and industrial areas, the more valuable wetlands become. Streams and rivers obviously cannot handle extreme events.
While Ivan's wrath is still fresh on our minds, perhaps we should rethink the value of wetlands. Sure, they provide critical habitat for waterfowl and other aquatic life, and the vegetation that lives there filters pollutants from the waters the seep through. But the human value of wetlands is the flood protection they provide.
The United States, and much of the world for that matter, has only a fraction of the wetlands that existed 200 years ago. Maybe limiting economic development in wetlands isn't such a bad idea after all.
sshalaway@aol.com