Word: floodplains
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...another problem with developing, said other residents such as Peter V. Cignetti III, is that the site is in the middle of a floodplain. Disturbing the plain, Cignetti said, may cause flooding problems in residential homes near the site...
...dinosaur burial ground, now a dry, undulating pasture of sage and buffalo grass just below the North Dakota border, was once a subtropical floodplain, where dinosaurs roamed amid palm trees and ferns on the edge of a dying inland sea. One day a mature male T. rex, weighing up to five tons and measuring nearly 40 feet in length, died in a silty washout. At least two albertosaurs, sharp-toothed scavengers about half T. rex's size, fed on the carcass, leaving a few of their teeth behind. Within months a river overflowed its banks and swept the bones away...
...long after floodwaters have crested will play host to a chocolate-colored inland sea sprawling across the spine of the Midwest -- a stagnant, festering stew of industrial waste, agricultural pesticides and raw sewage that laminates buildings in goo and provides a superb growing environment for bacteria. The entire floodplain, says Anita Walker in Des Moines, Iowa, will be a "muddy, stinky, awful mess to clean...
...protect the communities that sprang up on the river's edge, and most of the time it has. But many environmentalists believe that, over the years, the corps's attempts to control the Mississippi have backfired. Left to its own devices, a flooding river spreads horizontally, filling its natural floodplain and enriching it with fertile, alluvial soil. Along the Mississippi, however, this pattern of natural flow has been increasingly blocked by a patchwork of levees...
...Hannibal, Missouri, can only be thankful that it has just completed construction of a new $8 million floodwall, without which the Mark Twain home and museum would now be underwater. But absolutely critical to stemming future flood losses, a federal task force concluded last year, is protection of riverine floodplains from further development. In some cases it may even prove cost effective to relocate entire flood-prone communities. "We need to start giving land back to the river," says Larry Larson, head of Wisconsin's floodplain program. "If we don't, sooner or later the river will take it back...