This is one story that NPR aired recently.
The Mississippi is a river that floods. There are levees to protect people, but people can’t totally control nature. Sometimes it’s all too much. And, knowing this, there’s a system in place to bust out some of the levees to flood a bunch of (largely) farmland and more sparsely populated areas to save population centers. It’s very similar to that old moral conundrum about seeing an out-of-control train barreling down a track where it is sure to kill five people, but you have the chance to re-route the train by switching the track down a way that has only one person who will be killed. Is it fair to that one person? Absolutely not! But is it proper to save five people by sacrificing one? I believe most people would give a qualified “yes.”
But here’s the thing that does it for me, here. The guy interviewed in the NPR article says, “Well, it’s their property. We don’t own the property. We have flowage easements in some areas. And in other areas, the land naturally floods every year anyway, so the courts decided that easements weren’t appropriate for those areas. It’s some of the richest farmland in the world, and so every farmer is a gambler at some point. And when the cards go in their favor, they can experience some truly productive harvests. It was not the case this year though.”
In other words, this land, prone to floods, is purchased or leased by farmers who know what the game is. (Most years it doesn’t flood – so why not plant crops and make productive use of the land instead of just wasting the space?) That land is very fertile from previous floods, and this is the gamble those farmers take. They can grow lots of good produce, knowing that in any given year, it’s all going to be lost to flood damage. They know going into this that it’s part of the cost of doing business. And since flood easements cover wide areas, people living there surely must know that if the Big One comes, it’s going to hit them first.
Since it’s a known risk that comes with the territory, I don’t have a huge problem with this being the off year that they know is coming now and then. It sucks that it has to happen, for sure, but it sucks a lot less than just letting the river kill and damage so much more.