The hearts of the people of Western Pennsylvania go out to people in the cities and villages of the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Russia and Romania. They are suffering flooding of a magnitude in some areas unprecedented in more than 150 years. We here remember floods very well.
Flooding in Central Europe is not new. What is different now is the nature of the area that is flooded. New circumstances indicate a need for new measures to deal with deluges.
The rivers of Central Europe -- the Danube, the Elbe, the Vltava, the Mulde -- have been out of control for days now and are in the process of sweeping away years of building and rebuilding. A hundred people are dead so far, hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes, the damage is estimated in the billions and many fine old buildings and monuments, including Dresden's Opera House, have been seriously damaged.
Everyone understands that this does happen from time to time in that area. Records have been kept of great floods there since 1342.
It used to happen in this area, too, until dams were built to control the water flow. Some residents of this area remember helping people haul their furniture upstairs to get away from the muddy waters of one or more of our rivers out of control, and the ghastly cleanup afterward. And most of us have seen the plaques on buildings and bridges marking the high-water point of the March 1936 event, perhaps the granddaddy of all of our floods.
The Central European floods do raise questions of cause and control. The worst floods usually come in the spring, when the snows melt in the European mountains and send water cascading down into lower-lying areas. (Sometimes floods do happen in the summer. The last major one was in 1997.)
Global warming Cassandras will point at these floods and at the chunks of glacier ice breaking off up around the North Pole and say that global warming is preceding at a pace more rapid than even the most partisan evidence would support. This is silly, given the centuries of Central European flooding.
A better explanation of the severity of the damage is the rapid increase in urbanization and suburbanization in Europe. A flood, soaking a field, covering it with nutrients and then receding, is a good thing in a rural area. It constitutes a major catastrophe in newly built suburbs, unanchored by trees.
In any case, we deeply regret the losses of the people of Central Europe. We suggest that the subject of how to build cities and suburbs in such a way that the devastation from the regular floods is somehow controlled as worthy of extensive study, followed by action. Not that Americans have this down to a science by any means, but we have learned a few things in some areas and have acted accordingly.
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