A lot of Memphis is low-lying. It is a river town. As Hattie alluded to, we as a nation fupped duck when we started leveeing to protect populations.Every leveed town means that the water must go somewhere else, which floods another town. Bam, 150 years later we have a river system between two levees. This helps to force the river to self-scour its bed which makes shipping safer for larger vessels.

However, instead of spreading over a large area and slowly receding, water is shunted immediately into the river system causing a huge bulge of water to zoom down the system. If the lower system is already saturated then the water has nowhere to go but up.

Also, the river scouring slowly moves upstream just as a waterfall etches the land upstream, receding higher into the elevation. This scouring proceeds up each tributary, too. This causes local bank erosion and then of course, screams for bank stabilization projects and channelization projects, further exacerbating the problem of increased velocity.

We have created a giant positive feedback loop and we cannot find a way out. Your congressmen love USACE projects in your district.