Dear Yale Law Community,
Below is an abstract our upcoming presentation on Thursday, April 9, 2015, which is based our
new book Mississippi River Tragedies: A Century of Unnatural Disaster (NYU Press 2014). The
book is intended as a general audience law and history text, but it provides entry points for
deeper legal research into topics including sovereign immunity, federally-subsidized flood
insurance, the regulatory takings doctrine, land use regulation, climate change and sea level
rise, and environmental justice:
Mississippi River Tragedies: A Century of Unnatural Disaster: Few may realize
the extent of the Mississippi River Basin, which drains about 40 percent of the
continental United States and extends as far east as New York, Pennsylvania,
Virginia, and North Carolina. Here, Congress forged many national water policies
throughout a century of trial and error that transformed otherwise natural
events such as floods, droughts, and hurricanes into "unnatural disasters."
Engineers, with the approval of Congress, have done astounding things to bend
the Mississippi River to their will: forcing one of its tributaries to flow uphill,
transforming over a thousand miles of roiling currents into a placid staircase of
water, and wresting the lower half of the river apart from its wetlands and
floodplain. These efforts have been in pursuit of an unnatural human construct—
the floodless floodplain. The transformation of the river basin was facilitated by
a critical trio of federal laws and policies: 1) the Flood Control Act of 1928, which
granted broad immunity to the Army Corps of Engineers as it re-worked the
river; 2) the Disaster Relief Act of 1950, which attempted to develop a
coordinated federal response to floods and other disasters but prompted
reactive, rather than proactive, relief; and 3) the National Flood Insurance
Program of 1968, which provided federally subsidized insurance to floodplain
developments. Good intentions notwithstanding, disaster continues to plague
the nation's waterways and floodplains in the Mississippi basin and beyond.
We’re providing you with the Introduction and Chapter 1 for additional background. Thank you
for your interest, and we look forward to seeing you on April 9.
Best,
Christine Klein & Sandra Zellmer