River Levees for the Urban Planning Dummy

Natural levee formation

We just happened to notice that it had been months since the last time we checked up on our most-decorated dumbass, the pride of Katy, Joan Whetzel. It's not that Joan is absent from the web, it's just that the competition for this coveted award is so fierce. Not. Whatever the case, it took exactly one click on her profile at HubPages.com to come up with more misinterpreted factoids and mangled prose in the form of "River Levees and Flood Control."¹

As is typical of Whetzel's semi-science, she failed to mention that the idea of building levees is based in the natural world: when rivers are allowed to behave normally (without interference by, say, the Army Corps of Engineers), they naturally develop levees along their banks. Local roads in the Mississippi delta of Louisiana actually follow some of these slightly-raised fossil levees. But enough of reality, let's look at some of Joan's work. Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.²

• "It is the nature of river systems to overflow their banks during rainy seasons or heavy snow melts. Those people choosing to build communities along rivers frequently find their homes, farms, and businesses flooded as a result." – We guess that depends on your definition of "frequently."
• "They are constructed with a broad base that tapers as it rises moderately thick wall with a flat top." – Wait, what?
• "Rivers carry silt downstream, to the sea. Over time, some of this silt gets deposited along the river bed, slowly making the river channel shallower. Since the river channel now holds less volume, the likelihood of the river flooding its banks at the first heavy rain or snow melt grows exponentially." – A) Joan means "sediment," not "silt"; B) no, the likelihood does not "[grow] exponentially." Maybe if Joan knew what "exponentially" means?
• "...following heavy rains... the water is moving at such a high rate of speed and with such intensity, that the water starts carrying the dirt away..." – Again, that depends on your definition of "a high rate of speed"!
• "Levee system maintenance and flood prevention involves river widening efforts [and] dredging to increase river depth..." – Dredging is not to "increase" river depth, it is to maintain river depth. Oh, and how do you widen a river once you've built levees, Joan?

Whetzel's ignorance of levees and the building thereof is obvious. She says nothing about the extent of levees along the river, zero about reinforcing levees on the outside of meanders (riprap, etc.), zip about the importance of vegetative cover, and squat about the internal structure of levees. All she can say is that they are "created by piling up dirt along the river banks and packing it down hard." Sadly, there's a lot more to designing a levee system than packing piles of dirt. But Joan either didn't find that out in her "research," didn't understand it if she did find it, or didn't feel it important enough to mention to her readers. Based on the word length and the construction, we had to wonder if this was a "title" she couldn't get past the content editors at eHow.com, so she repurposed it for HubPages. Either way, it's definitely Dumbass of the Day material!

¹ The post has been deleted, but you can still see it using archive.org's Wayback machine. Its URL was   joanwz.hubpages.com/hub/River-Levees-and-Flood-Control
² Our apologies to Lerner and Lowe...

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