And the Creek Don’t Rise

There was an interesting question that came up over the weekend regarding who should take responsibility for an expensive (but not particularly dangerous) natural disaster. I’m not sure if it’s really a question of ethics, apart from the obvious issue of taking responsibility for one’s actions, but in this case it’s not clear if any one person (or agency) was responsible, or if this really is one of those occasional “acts of god” so beloved of the insurance writers. Here are the facts as reported by the local media:

On Saturday the 20th, heavy rains in western and central Michigan caused the Grand River to rise, and eventually overflow its banks near the city of Ionia. As a result, a field by the side of the river, which was being used as a temporary parking lot at a music festival hosted by a local radio station, was flooded, and something on the order of 1,000 cars were partly or fully immersed in the water. The best guess is that it will be until Wednesday (e.g. today) before the ground dries out enough to remove the cars, at which point the question of which ones are reparable and which ones have been totaled by the water damage will come into play. Keep in mind that immersion in water will generally cause more damage to a car’s interior and power train systems than the book value of the vehicle, which means that anything that was submerged to the cabin level is probably a write-off…

The obvious question is whether the flooding could have been prevented. There is a dam that crosses the river just above the festival site, but it’s what’s called a “run of river” dam, meaning that it has no flood-control properties and no flood basin or flood channels to contain or re-direct the waters. In fact, the dam’s owners are only licensed to use it as a hydroelectric station; the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) would not have permitted them to try to use the dam to intervene, even if it had the capacity to do any good, which it didn’t. Flooding along the Grand River is actually an annual event when the local snowpack melts; the reason there aren’t any permanent structures on that site is that those fields are covered with water and mud every year when the river hits flood stage. It’s just that those floods normally happen in the spring…

As such, the question of who is to blame becomes a little murky. The power company that owns the dam couldn’t have intervened if they’d wanted to, but what about the festival organizers? Should they have been aware of the flood risk? Should the radio station which sponsored the event take responsibility? What about the government agencies that issued permits to hold a festival on that site and use that field as a temporary parking lot (state, county or city)? Or should the people who parked their cars next to a river on a summer day when there were violent storm cells in the area and the National Weather Service had already issued a flash flood warning for the area call their own insurance companies and hope for the best?

Almost as difficult a question is how much each person should be paid to replace their car, assuming that someone is going to. Just giving each owner the Blue Book value of their car won’t enable them to replace it; most cars don’t retain a book value of more than a fraction of the purchase price, and in many cases the book value will be less than what the owner still owes on the purchase. But purchasing new cars for everyone involved isn’t practical either; the Federal Trade Commission reports that the average new car in America costs $28,400 – that would be $28.4 million to replace all 1,000 cars, and while that would be good for the local economy (assuming the replacements were all manufactured and sold locally) I’m not sure who around here has $28.4 million just lying around…

So who’s to blame for this fiasco? The festival promoters, the festival sponsors, the local government that issued the permits, the local government that DIDN’T put a flood-control basin on the Grand River, the state/Federal government that didn’t shut down the festival because of dangerous weather conditions, or the people who didn’t think twice about parking next to a river during a flash flood warning? Even more to the point, who should pay to clean up the results? Keep in mind that if any of the government agencies or private (tax-paying) companies involved end up footing the bill, the person who is going to ultimately pay for this fiasco is the taxpayer – e.g., you…

It’s worth thinking about…