1463 Where to point the finger next?

Watching the blame game heat up has caused me to look a little closer to home. I'll toss out some thoughts, but although I'm a "problem solver" by nature, I confess I see the problem in my own backyard, but have no solution to offer, and I'm not using that term idiomatically. I mean the backyard I see when I look out my living room window.

First, I'll digress, as is my pattern. I grew up near the Rock River in northern Illinois. Every spring I would see the flooding, and even as a child I wondered, "Why do people live there?" Same thoughts went through my mind this past week while watching the New Orleans tragedy. Of course, in drier weather as we drove by those same homes perched on stilts next to the Rock River, I would draw my own child-like conclusions seeing the automobiles sitting on concrete blocks in the yards, the mounds of trash, the junk yard dogs barking at us, and the pasty skin color of the children in their shabby clothes. Yes, as a child my conclusion was these people were so poor that there was no place else for them to live but near the water. "They" made those poor people live there. That they wanted to be there, didn't want the confinements of town life, zoning and rules, never even crossed my mind. Here is a recent report on that river with good maps and great photographs. It is available on the web in a pdf form, but I can't seem to get it to load.

I haven't lived there for many years, but when I am in that area I see that people still want the calming beauty of the river area even though there is still some flooding (more controlled now). Only now, most of the shacks are gone. The homes are definitely upscale, just like here in central Ohio where people build gorgeous homes between Route 33 and the Scioto River; homes that sit on stilts or high foundations, property surrounded by walls to push the flooding problem further down stream; houses that require evacuation when the ice flows break and back up at the dam, built some years ago to relieve flooding in our area, but which probably creates problems down stream.

Every city on a river must have dozens of conflicting jurisdictional reports from finger pointing officials--and we have two major rivers flowing through Columbus, bordered by dozens of suburbs. And we have creeks. When we lived on Abington Road there was a creek one house away. The only name I ever heard for it came from a 90 years old I knew in the 1970s--Evans Ditch. It had been created by contractors for run off. But the area was lovely until the terrible storm in the early 1970s when every house (except ours) had 2 or 3 feet of water in the basement. We had no basement. The Ditch was repaired, people built stronger rip-rap to keep water from their yards and basement, and water began to back up further north where there was new building. It was called Turkey Run in that area as I recall, beautiful but often flooded.

We have that creek (Turkey Run Watershed--I'm not sure it is a "real" mother nature creek, or a man made creek for run off) surrounding our condo complex. Our view from every unit is spectacular because of the creek. There are huge trees and wild life, right here in the middle of the city--the scene refreshes our spirits and the air.

Our association takes care of our side. Even so, I'm not sure what our erosion control that we pay for through our assessments is creating further down stream as it flows into Columbus, past the hospital complex and into another jurisdiction. When I walk along the creek, I can see that the other side, bordered by maybe a dozen different properties with near million dollar homes is eroding badly. Those people are on a steep ravine, and although they enjoy the same trees we do, they probably cannot see the creek and the erosion because they wouldn't be able to get to it without great effort. Our side, however, is helpless to control their behavior, like blowing all their leaves into the creek, or not trimming the dead wood.


Deer seen from our unit