Oh, my aching head.
Short version: Stephen Lathrop lives in an area in Illinois that routinely floods and is just as routinely gets declared to be a disaster area. The Army Corps of Engineers – a group that I had hitherto thought, perhaps foolishly, to be somewhat more competent than it’s appearing here – had drawn up a bunch of plans to alleviate the problem. As the Corps had never actually fixed the problem, Mr. Lathrop eventually did it for his local area by buying an old dump, getting the permits to convert it into a lake, and doing the conversion on his own dime (‘dime’ being defined as ‘200,000 dollars’). As a reward, the Corps responded in 1990 by suing Lathrop, despite the fact that his conversion was roughly similar to the Corps’ multiple plans (and, more importantly, worked in 1995 to prevent flooding in Mr. Lathrop’s neighborhood). The Corps eventually handed the entire issue over to the EPA for prosecution, and then the EPA… essentially said to make the lake bigger, and everything would be fine*. So Lathrop spent another 100,000 dollars to expand the lake property… only to be told by the Corps that he couldn’t do that. Now the guy’s almost in bankruptcy… over twenty years after deciding that it’d be great if his neighborhood stopped flooding.
Even shorter version: The Army Corps of Engineers has spent the last two-plus decades punishing a guy for the crime at being better at flood prevention than it is. Continue reading Victims of Government: Stephen Lathrop and the Army Corps of Engineers.