Chicago is spending $3.8 billion on a project meant to combat flooding by bolstering storm water drainage systems, but some experts say this massive investment isn’t going to fix the problem, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal detailed how Chicago has spent over 50 years and billions of dollars building tunnels and reservoirs to protect from flooding. Recently, however, these costly systems have been largely ineffective at their jobs.
On July 2, eight inches of rain overwhelmed the systems and caused sewage and storm water to spill into the Chicago River, forcing officials to reverse the flow to send the sewage and stormwater into Lake Michigan, the city’s source of drinking water.
Already, $3.8 billion has been spent on the tunnel and reservoir plan, but that hasn’t been enough to prevent flooding. Even a recent project to expand the McCook Reservoir may not be enough to effectively solve the issue.
Experts admit that poor planning is to blame. Rob Moore, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Journal, “A lot of times we’re designing these things for yesterday’s storms, not tomorrow’s storms.”
Chicago isn’t the only city suffering from a dearth of thoughtful urban planning. A new $31 billion dike in Galveston Bay, Texas, is being built to protect the Texas Gulf Coast from storms, but now experts are raising concerns over its ability to handle some of the storms frequently encountered today.
Throwing fistfuls of money at a problem rarely yields results. Instead, innovation and forward thinking is needed to solve our most pressing problems.
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