Dams are the Northwest Flood Busters

The U.S. is being inundated with historic floods from Minnesota to Louisiana as a massive amount of water from heavy rainfall and snowmelt races down the Mississippi River. With U.S. taxpayers shouldering the majority of the claims through the National Flood Insurance Program, Bloomberg reports the Mississippi’s surge could result in the highest flooding losses since the $16 billion in claims following Hurricane Katrina.

Without our network of dams on the lower Columbia and Snake rivers, we’d be in the same fix.

On May 30, 1948, a levee on the flood-swollen Columbia River ruptured and within a...