Preface
It is widely believed that, after disaster strikes, "rebuilding is good therapy."
For decades, our local and national flood-recovery strategies have been geared to rebuilding as quickly as possible, setting the stage for each next disaster.
And so it was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But for many families in Tulsa, rebuilding became a way of life in the 1950s, ¹60s, and ¹70s. Flood disasters were occurring with numbing regularity, every two to four years, each one worse than the last. By the early 1980s, Tulsa County was leading the nation in the frequency of flood disasters, with nine federal flood disaster declarations in 15 years.
We were rebuilding the same houses on the same floodplains over and over again, at great public and private expense. Homes had been flooded and rebuilt as often as five times in six years. Some began to call it folly.Then, without warning in the wee hours of a Sunday morning before Memorial Day, 1984, more than a foot of rain fell on Tulsa. Abruptly, the city was awash, immobilized. Routed from sleep, city managers huddled in Tulsa¹s basement emergency operations center, dazed by each new volley of reports of death and destruction. We could do little more than preside over the unfolding disaster.
The floods were flashing down Tulsa's creeks and lowlands like wet tornadoes. Throughout much of the city, thousands of people were trapped in the lightning-sparked darkness, begging for boats or swimming blindly for dry ground. Their cries for help mingled with thunder, the screams of emergency sirens, and the eerie whine of auto horns shorting out in rising water.
Drivers were careening into walls of water 10 feet high, spinning and washing away down instant rivers. Cars, trucks, and mobile homes, crumpling like discarded Styrofoam cups, became waterborne projectiles. As the storm raged on, 40 people clung to rooftops in a mobile home park until they could be rescued, one by one, by an outstretched hand from a life-flight helicopter.Morning light found 14 dead, 288 injured. Seven thousand cars were damaged or destroyed, including three fire trucks, 80 police cars, and 10 ambulances. Nine bridges and two streets were shattered; 10,000 homes and businesses were without power. More than 6,800 buildings were damaged or destroyed, including 500 mobile homes, 2,500 apartment units, and 3,370 homes. The damage toll: more than $180 million.
In the basement emergency operations center, Tulsa leaders said: "Enough."
Even while the water was still rising, we began working on what came to be called "flood-hazard mitigation," searching for ways to make the response to our 1984 flood reduce the scope of Tulsa¹s next disaster. None of it was easy, but it was essential.
This report traces some of the lessons Tulsa learned, flood by flood, over generations. We hope our hard lessons can be of use to others. We're still learning.
Rebuilding may be therapeutic, but what of the family who repeatedly rebuilds the same house or business in the same floodplain and waits, perennially, for the next disaster? For such a family ‹ and the taxpayer ‹ flood-hazard mitigation would be far better therapy.