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Creative Commons License
From Pine View Farm by Frank Bell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.pineviewfarm.net.
From Pine View Farm

A Tale of Two Towns: One Going Up, One Going Down 5

Going down: Picher, Oklahoma, where the guvmint is buying out all the residents.

The culprits of Picher’s demise are the same lead and zinc mines that brought the town its prosperity and boosted its population to a high of 16,000 before World War II. But the mines shut down in the 1970s, and all that is left in and around Picher are about 1,000 people and giant gray piles of mining waste, known locally as “chat,” some hundreds of feet tall and acres wide.

(No word on what happened to the mining companies who built and simultaneously destroyed Picher–they may be long gone).

Going up: Houses along the Neshaminy Creek (Check out the slideshow), where the guvmint is paying to raise houses onto stilts because of flooding:

For flood-battered property owners who want to keep living in high-risk flood zones, elevating homes on stilts or towering foundations is an increasingly popular option. However, the process can take months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the result might look weird. Above all, though, the wisdom of elevation as a flood-mitigation strategy is debatable.

I’m not sure how I feel about this latter story. On one hand, the flooding didn’t used to be so bad, not until the better part of Bucks County got paved over, exacerbating the flooding. On the other hand, why should we, the taxpayers, pay for persons to stay in harms way? I sort of would rather see my taxes go to educate some child out of poverty.

Yes, the same reasoning could extend to New Orleans. The incompetence of the Corps of Engineers is a separate issue from the wisdom of living eight feet below sea level next to a major river.

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February 4, 2007 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Uncategorized |

5 comments

  1. Karen

    February 4, 2007 at 3:45 pm

    I think I’m going to fall over in a dead faint. Frank, we may ALMOST agree on something here! The wisdom of rebuilding a city where the same thing will happen again.

    Thoughts on the west coast?

     
  2. Opie

    February 5, 2007 at 5:56 pm

    If it slides off into the ocean we won’t have to rebuild it.

     
  3. Frank

    February 5, 2007 at 6:26 pm

    Kind of like California, Opie?

     
  4. Karen

    February 5, 2007 at 7:46 pm

    Nevada would be water front land!

     
  5. Frank

    February 6, 2007 at 7:45 pm

    Little problem there. It’s called the Sierra Nevada.

     
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