“Many academics and journalists apparently don’t know the difference between a 100-year flood and an unpredictable inundation from a super storm–and the different impacts in the Plains and the Basin states.”

“A political and/or market policy solution for damages from super-storm inundations has a greater likelihood of success by substituting realism for ideology: Inundations are not the same as 100-year floods and are not the result of man-made climate change.”

Ambrose Bierce’s fable of Philosophers Three tells the story of a Bear, a Fox and an Opossum that were attacked by a flood inundation. The Bear went forward to fight the flood. The Fox thought the Bear was a fool and climbed into a hollow tree stump. However, the Opossum recognized there were evil forces at work that could not easily be confronted but also could not be avoided, so he decided to play dead.…

“The most obvious function that people overlook when criticizing speculators is their ability to head off shortages”

— Andrew Beattie, “Market Speculators: More Help Than Harm,” Investopedia.com

Imagine a recessionary market for housing or land where no one is selling, a periodic event here in California. At such times, a group of speculators is always ready, willing, and able to buy in this thin or virtually nonexistent market.

The situation is similar during water droughts (which occur in four of five years on average), when few if any farmers or cities want to sell water at wholesale.

Nonetheless, economist Matthew Fienup of California Lutheran University proclaims that the first so-called groundwater “market” has been established in the agricultural groundwater basin of the Oxnard Plain in Ventura County (“How California Got Its First Groundwater Market,” Water Deeply, June 27, 2017).…

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt” – Mark Twain

“Consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a considerable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam’s bursting, it’s not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam.

Surprisingly, though … the concern falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That’s because of psychological denial: the only way to preserve one’s sanity while looking up everyday at the dam is to deny the possibility that it could burst.”

“And yet, the federal government – not to mention the states – has invested shockingly little on such (flood repair) projects in recent years, spending about as much on flood recovery as prevention. Trump has vowed to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure, but it’s unclear if levees and dams will be included. Even in California, the center of “the resistance” (to Trump), we need help and cooperation from the federal government. It’s not about petty politics or about Trump’s twisted vision of loyalty, assuming he even honors it. It’s about saving lives.”

– Erika Smith (editorial writer), “There the Threat of Oroville Dam – Then There’s Trump,” Sacramento Bee, February 12, 2017.

“California passed a $7.545 billion Proposition 1 Water Bond in 2015 that includes $395,000,000 for “flood management.”