Contrarian: Flood the Courts!
The terms of this debate, however, may be about to change. Researchers at Temple University are wrapping up a study of Northeast Philadelphia’s Pennypack Creek that promises to pinpoint the sources of destructive flooding in the suburbs. It might be the first storm-water study detailed enough to assign explicit blame to townships and developments that either built without proper flood controls or have failed to maintain what they built. Even the director of the Temple study, a mild-mannered academic, concedes that the work is “powder-keg stuff.”
Ladies and gentlemen, start your lawyers.
Flood control is difficult, but it’s not rocket science. Officials in Pennsylvania’s upstream communities know what it takes to stop pissing on everyone down in the valley. They’ve dragged their heels on storm-water plans for years, and they don’t follow the plans they have. Property owners downstream are finally making some waves. One often-flooded shopping center in Lower Moreland, Montgomery County, now has a lawyer who, like dozens of other lawyers, can’t wait to get his hands on that Temple University study.
The lowlanders may just hold the legal high ground. The principles in common law go back quite a ways. You can’t throw trash in your neighbor’s yard, you can’t shovel snow off your roof onto his, and you can’t drain your roof by flooding his basement. Raindrops don’t fall with zip codes of origin attached to them, so proving liability from miles away is a challenge. But the Pennypack study will likely show widespread incidences of simple negligence, where townships ignored their state-approved drainage plans and homeowners’ associations saved a few bucks by letting catchment basins silt up and clog. Litigation should help sort it all out, but first the lowlanders have to get mad, and then they’ve got to get lawyers.
Of course, it would be cheaper, smarter and more humane if, as in Europe, rational planning could decide who can build what where. But that ain’t America, and it certainly ain’t Pennsylvania, where the constitution sets every municipality against each other, and the Devil take the hindmost. Lawsuits are kind of a free-market method of planning. They are ugly, sloppy, nasty, arbitrary, and driven by greed, retribution and desperation. In other words, they are the American Way.
So once this Temple study comes out later this year, I hope Philadelphia, Yardley and New Hope get real patriotic. I hope low-lying towns hire the Temple team to run the same studies on streams and rivers throughout the region. Then they should go get six dozen lawyers and sue the bejesus out of every little one-horse township, shopping center and homeowner association that has traded fields and forests for macadam and McMansions.
Sue them, sue them, and sue them again. Sue them until they could dam up all those erosion-ravaged creek beds with their giant stacks of legal bills. Sue them until that dark, rainy day when they realize it would be cheaper to fire all the lawyers and start keeping their runoff to themselves.
