The awesome stench of the greatest future real estate racket in history continues to develop. My dad used to finance such flood control projects in the "Inland Empire" where the current real estate crash shows us the future of the one they have in store, only it will be bigger. Such infrastructure projects are ALWAYS for the purpose of making otherwise dodgy future investments profitable; they are NEVER about protecting current infrastructure.
Now that the big real estate crooks in the RINO-CRAT Party (Times Mirror and Southern Pacific in particular) have used the Delta Smelt to take farmland at pennies on the dollar from those who've held it for forty years hoping to do the same thing, now that they've assured a massive profit on "insta-cities," adjacent to the stops along their massive and publicly-subsidized "high-speed-rail" project, now they want existing taxpayers to pony up for the cost of flood control so that they can build houses on otherwise economically undevelopable land and cash in.
It's flat. It's cheap. Let's build. Here comes another 20 million people.
True, there are dams in place that did not exist in the 1800s. However, if there were a similar storm today, I don’t know if they could handle the floodwaters. I remember the Conowingo Dam was threatened in 1972 after Agnes rolled through the Mid-Atlantic, dumping 12-16 inches of rain.
You and I talked about this years ago. At the time, I was only able to grasp pieces of it. It has been absolutely fascinating (and frightening) to watch how they have manipulated the system to have all the cards fall into place. IMO, organized crime is alive and well (of the political/wealth-building variety, not necessarily the wiseguy variety, although they do intersect oftentimes.)