Buying property on Red River flood plains

[Cruz Azul Guy]

Originally Posted by Reziac

While it would be silly to prohibit all use (as you say that's some of the best farmland in the world) it's just plain stupid to build residential housing in areas that you KNOW have been underwater in the relatively recent past...But building a new housing development, where hundreds or thousands of people will live by choice rather than by professional necessity, on land that was seriously underwater as recently as the 1960s, strikes me as somewhere between slow-learners and outright fraudulent.

I don't place as much fault on the builders/developers as I do on the people who chose to invest in these housing developments. The developers base their business on supply and demand and they wouldn't have built there if there wasn't demand from people to buy into the developed property and live there. There apparently WAS enough demand and the developed property was bought up and occupied the area that was under the flood emergency, now as far as I'm concerned the responsibility has shifted from the developer to the home buyers. You could bring up ethic issues with the developer but to a certain extent I don't think they should be obligated to apply those as long as they are within the laws and regulations of the area. On the flip side, had a developer turned a large flood plain section into housing and then nobody bought their because they didn't want to accept the risks of getting flooded then it is the developer's fault for building where there wasn't demand and a stiff financial loss would be his/her punishment.

[FargoBison]

Originally Posted by Slig

I'm not impressed. I'm embarrassed Fargo didn't learn their lesson from what happened in Grand Forks in 1997, it's shameful. And if they don't do anything about it this time after it's all over the same exact thing is going to happen again sooner than later and it'll be deja vu all over again. I spoke with someone yesterday who had several family members living in the Grand Forks area during the 1997 floods. Their homes were lost. They have since learned their lesson and all of them don't live anywhere near a river. That impresses me more than a bunch of people fumbling around trying to stop a flood they weren't prepared for.

There are some homes in Fargo that are built in high risk areas, but what needs to be remembered is that when you start talking about river levels above 41 feet, areas of the city well outside the flood plain start getting put in danger. That is one reason why I reacted a little negatively right away to this thread. You can chastise people for building in the flood plain but if the river would have gone to 42 or 43 feet and a levee had failed, the potential was there to affect homes that were never in any kind of flood plain to speak of.

Fargo is trying to work on long term flood protection, two proposals are on the table right now. One costing $800 million and the other around $150 million. After 97 Fargo was basically told to wait in line behind other communities in obtaining flood protection, kind of hard for the city to do anything without the help of the federal government when you consider the scale of what needs to be done. The city did spend around $40 million on flood protection after 97, that added protection did help this year but it clearly isn't enough.

[Cain]

Slig: by your logic, the responsibility appears to fall with the city that issued the permits to allow building of housing in areas in flood prone areas. No permit, no building.

[chester]

Slig, you are still stuck on lecturing and condemning the people of Minnesota and North Dakota for building on the flood plains in the Red River Valley, but you have yet to comment on my question about the 10 MILLIONS of people who choose to build and develop in other areas of the country that see more frequent disaster of their homes and businesses OVER and OVER again. I am talking about the states and populations who continue to build in known earthquake, hurricane, and tornado zones. The flooding in the Red River Valley of this magnitude is rare in comparison to the other states that experience natural disaster time and time again...sometimes multiple times a year. Could you please share your knowledge and thoughts on what the 10 Millions of people in those areas should be doing with their lives as compared to a few thousand people in ND-MN.? Just curious.

[Reziac]

Originally Posted by chester

Slig, you are still stuck on lecturing and condemning the people of Minnesota and North Dakota for building on the flood plains in the Red River Valley, but you have yet to comment on my question about the 10 MILLIONS of people who choose to build and develop in other areas of the country that see more frequent disaster of their homes and businesses OVER and OVER again. I am talking about the states and populations who continue to build in known earthquake, hurricane, and tornado zones. The flooding in the Red River Valley of this magnitude is rare in comparison to the other states that experience natural disaster time and time again...sometimes multiple times a year. Could you please share your knowledge and thoughts on what the 10 Millions of people in those areas should be doing with their lives as compared to a few thousand people in ND-MN.? Just curious.

The big difference is that building standards, when adhered to, prevent damage from ANY hurricane (barring unusual rain/flooding, but hurricane flood-risk zones are usually contiguous with river-flood risk zones), and from all but the most severe earthquakes, and then only if you're on ground zero. And you don't have to barrier off good farmland to achieve that. Just build to ordinary standards. That's why we have earthquakes all the time in CA that do little or no damage (you only hear about the ones you do because they knock down older structures that aren't up to modern building code), and why Livingston MT survives intact despite having Cat-5 hurricane force winds EVERY winter. The biggest reason hurricanes do so much damage is that the areas they're prone to hit also have a lot of old or shoddy rapid-development construction. Hurricanes taking out houses in Florida are why using staples in house framing is now generally prohibited -- nails will hold their grip under wind stress, but staples will not.

You can also prevent most tornado damage if you're willing to stick to concrete buildings and underground residences. But even without those measures -- the path of destruction is usually relatively small -- no more than a mile or so in length and a few hundred yards wide. The main drawback is that there's no predictability, other than in the most general sense, so you can't simply avoid risky ground -- like you can with bad flood zones.

Conversely, a proper flood covers miles and miles of ground, and there's not really a lot you can do to prevent it from rolling over everything in its way. There isn't a relatively small ground-zero like with earthquakes and tornados -- but the tradeoff is that we have pretty good historical data and can define the risk zones with pretty good accuracy. Since those risk zones are known and tolerably predictable -- why are people building on them?? (As someone else pointed out, why are building permits being issued in high risk zones anyway?? a few dry years or even decades doesn't mean the risk is over!)

And what people don't realise is that those levees and flood control measures eventually destroy the farmland, since flooding is most of what renews soil nutrients, by bringing in silt. (Look what happened to lower Egypt after the Aswan Dam went into place...) To achieve immunity from floods you have to barrier the ground and/or build on stilts (assuming your ground is solid enough and/or you can afford to put pylons down to bedrock), neither of which is really practical.

Maybe this is nature's tradeoff... per USGS data, out of all of North America, North Dakota has the fewest and smallest earthquakes!

I used to live across the street from the Morningside Mo-Ho-Tel in Moorhead (is that still there?) If you drive through that neighbhourhood you'll notice that some yards are built up a couple feet above street level. Why is that, you ask? Because during torrential summer rains, the streets flood up to 18" deep. Building the house on just that little mound is the difference between replacing your carpet twice a year, and staying high and dry.

[Cruz Azul Guy]

Originally Posted by chester

Slig, you are still stuck on lecturing and condemning the people of Minnesota and North Dakota for building on the flood plains in the Red River Valley, but you have yet to comment on my question about the 10 MILLIONS of people who choose to build and develop in other areas of the country that see more frequent disaster of their homes and businesses OVER and OVER again. I am talking about the states and populations who continue to build in known earthquake, hurricane, and tornado zones. The flooding in the Red River Valley of this magnitude is rare in comparison to the other states that experience natural disaster time and time again...sometimes multiple times a year. Could you please share your knowledge and thoughts on what the 10 Millions of people in those areas should be doing with their lives as compared to a few thousand people in ND-MN.? Just curious.

I was on the verge of replying to this a couple times but Reziac laid it out quite nicely. Couldn't have said it better myself.

[Reziac]

Originally Posted by Slig

I was on the verge of replying to this a couple times but Reziac laid it out quite nicely. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Thanks It's actually something I've given a lot of thought to over the years... it's also a consideration for where *I* might live