Dutch lessons for the U.S.

Mother Jones: … Louisiana politicians are demanding "Category 5" protection, a system of flood defenses capable of repelling the worst that a hurricane could dish out. …

But models for this kind of endeavor already exist, and the best of them is in the Netherlands. Over the past 50 years, the Dutch have built the world's most sophisticated system of flood defenses. I went to see them two months after Katrina. After weeks of looking at decidedly low-tech structures of mud, steel, and concrete, it was like materializing into a Star Trek episode.…

But it's not the machinery so much as the political and legal system behind it that offers lessons for America. After an intense debate following the 1953 disaster, the Dutch decided to junk the philosophy that had guided them for hundreds of years. Instead of building hundreds of miles of dikes around inhabited areas—the approach now employed in New Orleans—they decided to raise gated barriers across the three large estuaries where the sea enters Dutch territory… Even Dutch pasturelands have more protection than the Big Easy.

To do all this, the Dutch had to push their science in new directions. "For a hydraulic engineer, this was like putting a man on the moon," Tjalle de Haan, a government engineer who worked on the projects, told me. But the true innovation was the acknowledgement that as environmental conditions change, humans must get out in front of them—and stay there. As land sinks, or the sea rises, the government must upgrade its flood defenses; in the Netherlands, that's a legal mandate, not a question to be debated, one pork-barrel project at a time, with each new legislative session.

… The Netherlands' approach—designing projects based on estimated risk—long ago became routine for the private U.S. nuclear, aviation, and energy industries, and for the government agencies that build bridges and other infrastructure. But not for the federal agency charged with protecting millions of people from floods, the Corps of Engineers.

Congress allocates money for water projects on the basis of political power, not a scientific accounting of who's most at risk.…