Who Thought That Was A Good Idea?

When natural disasters strike, it's sometimes hard to grasp the magnitude of the disaster, whether it's a forest fire, earthquake, or hurricane.  Sometimes a single photograph can perfectly capture the scope of the disaster.  Like this one, a photo published in the Chicago Tribune on 4/20/13 showing a flooded neighborhood in Des Plaines, IL, a Chicago suburb (north at the bottom).

 

In this neighborhood, the river forms a tight loop and the street of houses inside the loop are completely flooded.   Towards the bottom of the photo, you can see an area which is a spillway into a lake, presumably to give the river a place to go when the water gets high.   In this case, the spillway was no match for the river.

This is a google maps image of the neighborhood (north at the top):

So, here's the question: who on earth thought this tongue of land surrounded on three sides by a "flat" river that often overflows was a good place to build houses?  These are not vacation homes, they're year-round homes about 8 miles from O'Hare International Airport.  I don't mean to sound unsympathetic, but was it a good idea to build houses there?  Really?  And undoubtedly repair or rebuild them over and over?  Really?

This river is one of several in Northeast Illinois that are flat, meandering rivers that don't have much in the way of river banks to hold them in their channels.  For many years, anytime there's a significant rainfall, these rivers tend to fill up and overflow, although not as badly as was caused by last week's 6-7 inches of rain in 24 hours.  So if the "weird" weather patterns of the past several years is any indication of what's happening climate-wise, we might expect that flooding is going to get more frequent.  

I suspect that we ought to be having a discussion about moving residences away from flood-prone rivers as well as from coastal areas that are repeatedly hammered by hurricanes, and hillsides prone to mudslides.   But I doubt that we'll have that conversation.