Blue Highways: Ocean City, Maryland

Unfolding the Map

Amidst the development of Ocean City, just recently ravaged by Hurricane Sandy, we stop for a moment to think about development decisions.  Just why do, or should, we build on barrier islands?  That's my question for the day, explored below.  Locate Ocean City by checking out the Littourati Blue Highways map.

Book Quote

"Near Ocean City, Maryland, the shore became a six-lane strip of motels and condominiums tied together by powerlines.  The playground of Baltimore and Washington."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 13

Aerial view of Ocean City, Maryland. Photo by Tex Jobe at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Ocean City, Maryland

I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to write with the Ocean City theme, given the shortness of the quote and its otherwise unexciting information, until I looked at Ocean City on Google Earth.  The recent landfall of Hurricane Sandy, only a category 1 hurricane on the 5 point Saffir-Simpson Scale, underscored the fragility of Ocean City and other developed areas along barrier islands.  A barrier island is basically a spit of sand, built up by tidal action, that is separated by shallow waters from the mainland.

Barrier islands have served as a much needed bulwark against such storms as Sandy, and even more powerful storms.  As a hurricane moves toward land, its rotation and energy pushes a tremendous volume of water in front of it, much like a bulldozer pushes dirt.  This surge can be augmented by tides, so that the surge will be higher if the hurricane comes ashore at high tide than it would be if the surge comes ashore at low tide.

Barrier islands, as the first pieces of land that a storm surge hits, weaken the force of the surge and spare the mainland from the main force of the water.  Buildings that are on the mainland behind barrier islands may thus get spared the main brunt of the most damaging element, water, and therefore are much more likely to survive with little or no damage.

So why, might you ask, have we built up populated areas on the very places that get the main brute force of hurricanes?

The answer is money and politics.  Barrier islands are beachfront property, and developers find beachfront property prime areas to develop with condos overlooking the water, restaurants, luxury hotels, and other high-priced items to draw tourists, especially well-heeled ones from the nearby metropolises.  As development happens, and people begin to buy their summer condos and vacation homes, the less-wealthy arrive to fill the jobs at the restaurants and hotels and other service industries.  Sometimes, before you know it, a municipality has been created or enhanced in places that appear to be mini-paradises.

You've heard of many of these places.  South Padre Island, Texas.  Galveston, Texas.  Atlantic City, New Jersey.  In a few weeks, I'll be heading to Sarasota, Florida where part of the city consists of development along Siesta and Longboat Keys.  Tourists flock to these places for the mix of sun, sand, water and amenities and wealthier people buy houses along the water to enjoy the boating and to have a home-away-from-home.  I'm not suggesting that these places are going to go away...yet...

In 1900 the city of Galveston had one of the largest ports in the country which competed in importance with New York and New Orleans.  A city of 37,000 people had grown on this narrow spit of sand when the storm known as the Great Hurricane of 1900 hit.  Years of surviving other storms had convinced residents that they would never need fear any storms, and they had resisted building a proposed seawall to protect the city.  Galveston Island, only 8 and 1/2 feet high at its maximum, was completely inundated by an estimated 17 foot storm surge which tore buildings from their foundations and washed them into Galveston Bay behind.  Anywhere from 6,000 to 12,000 people died as a direct result from the storm, either from the storm itself or being buried for days under wreckage.  As a result, the glory days of Galveston passed, and though remnants of it are left, it has never regained its lost glory.

We may still ask the question, as people still clean up from our modern-day Hurricane Sandy, only a week or so distant in the past as I write this post, which ripped through the barrier-island city of Ocean City and caused widespread flooding and damage.  Why do we develop barrier islands?  After all, these places when hit sustain millions and billions of dollars in damages.  The resulting effects take their toll on all of us.  Insurance rates rise as claims are filed.  Taxes go to emergency relief and other programs that create stresses on federal, state and local governments.  People do not help themselves, refusing evacuation orders and then flooding hospitals with injuries that places stresses on health care.  Disease outbreaks are always a potential problem in the aftermath of hurricanes.  The latest report I've heard from Hurricane Sandy is the fear that unscrupulous people will refurbish hurricane-damaged vehicles and flood the used car market without revealing that they are storm-damaged cars.

I remember after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans (not on a barrier island but dependent on natural features such as the extensive, and disappearing, system of bayous and wetlands to blunt hurricanes as they approach), many people in the U.S. asked why should the the country continue to provide funding and relief to a place that exists below sea level and is likely to be hit by hurricanes.  Notwithstanding that New Orleans is one of our oldest and most historically significant cities, and that many people who live there have known no other place in their lives - it is their home - I think it is a fair question.  But if we are willing to ask that question, we should also be willing to ask the question of barrier island development.  Why should the U.S. continue to allow development when we know that hurricanes will scour these islands clean every so often?  For that matter, we should ask the question whenever there is development in areas that are subject to natural disaster.  Why should we allow farming and towns in known floodplains?  Should we keep allowing development in Tornado Alley when we know that tornadoes cause widespread damage there?  Why should we allow cities to be built along active fault lines that will occasionally rupture and cause widespread devastation?  Why should development occur in the shadows of volcanoes that will eventually erupt?

If we are willing to understand that along with benefits there will occasionally be costs in lives and property, as well as more diffuse costs in services and health, and we are willing to accept these costs, then we should build away.  But we should be aware that there will be costs, as nature every so often tragically reminds us.

Musical Interlude

In the 1960s, Tom Rush recorded Wasn't That a Mighty Storm, an old spiritual that may be about the Great Hurricane of 1900 that hit Galveston.  The song could easily apply to wherever hurricanes hit barrier islands. The footage of the destruction of Galveston in the accompanying video was filmed by none other than Thomas Edison.

If you want to know more about Ocean City

Maryland Coast Dispatch (newspaper)
Ocean City Chamber of Commerce
Ocean City Convention and Visitors Bureau
Town of Ocean City
Wikipedia: Ocean City

Next up: Crisfield, Maryland

Blue Highways: Somewhere on the Erie Canal

Unfolding the Map

The Erie Canal is huge.  Not necessarily in dimensions - it was only four feet deep and often just 40 feet wide, though it does span 363 miles from end to end.  However, it is really huge in that it was an massive government public works undertaking, criticized and ridiculed, that paid for itself in a short amount of time and contributed in countless ways to the development of the United States.  Stand with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) on the edge of the canal, imagine the packet boats filled with people and barges filled with goods towed by mules and horses, and learn more about this amazing piece of our history.  To find my approximation of where LHM stops at the canal, duck your head at the low bridge as you travel to the map.

Book Quote

"The canal, only four feet deep in its early years, had become a rank, bosky froggy trough.  But it was that forty-eight inches of water that did so much to open western New York and the Midwest to settlement and commerce....

"From Lake Erie to the Hudson River (363 miles, 83 stone locks, 13 aqueducts) the canal moved people and things between the middle of the nation and the ocean; it was this watercourse, as much as anything else, that made New York City the leading Atlantic port.  Travelers who had some money could take a packet boat with windows and berths, while poorer immigrants heading into the Midlands rode cheaper and drearier line boats.  Ten years after Clinton's Folly opened, the populations of Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo increased three hundered percent; the canal, having paid for itself in that decade, had changed the northwest quarter of America.  No paltry accomplishment for a scheme that even the visionary Thomas Jefferson saw as a little short of madness."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 6

The Erie Canal near Rome, New York. Photo by "genewest" and hosted at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to host page.

Somewhere on the Erie Canal

When I was in grammar school, we still had some music education in the public schools.  It didn't happen often, maybe once a week, but it usually involved some kind of percussion playing and/or singing.  I think we had a guest teacher who would come in and lead these sessions.

I remember that the song book with which we worked had patriotic songs, and I remember that there were a couple of folk songs in there that I liked, but which I can't really remember so many years distant.  John Henry might have been one of them, or at least it comes to mind.

The one snippet of song that I remember from that book is this:

Low bridge, everybody down,
Low bridge, 'cause we're comin' to a town.
And you'll always know your neighbor,
You'll always know your pal,
If you ever navigate upon the Erie Canal.

Why I remember this one lyric, I can't say.  After all, there were more recognizable songs in that book.  There were other tunes in that book that were fun to sing.  Yet I've always kept that lyric about the Erie Canal in my head.

The Erie Canal is one of those massive efforts in our history that shouldn't be forgotten, but the benefits of which are not often considered.  The concept was simple - create a waterway that joined a major river system with the Great Lakes so that development of the middle of the country could proceed.  The execution was anything but simple.  This waterway had to traverse over 363 miles of country with a total elevation rise of 600 feet, entailing inventiveness and the practical application of engineering that had never been used before.  The sum estimated to build it was considered to be almost unimaginable.  Even Thomas Jefferson, the man who sent Lewis and Clark into the interior with an instruction to look for woolly mammoths and giant sloths, thought that the project was practically insane for the time period.

Even so, it was taken up by the New York legislature and passed.  The canal became known as Clinton's Folly (after Gov. DeWitt Clinton of New York) and was widely expected to fail.  Yet it didn't.  It employed thousands of people in the construction, particularly recent immigrants in need of work, and many of whom died of disease in marshes.  At the time, the United States had no civil engineers, so it literally created the practice of civil engineering in the country.  The builders of the canal, with no practical experience, had to solve problems like marshes and escarpments that stood in the way of joining the Hudson River with Lake Erie.  The Canal also utilized new inventions, like hydraulic cement, to solve problems such as leaks.

How did the Canal work?  Draft animals such as mules or horses pulled barges and packet boats by walking along a towpath alongside of the canal.  There was only a towpath on one side of the canal, so when boats met each other, one draft animal would move toward the canal side of the towpath and the other toward the far side of the towpath.  The mule or horse team at the far side would stop and let the boat float, causing the towline to go flat, and the other team would step over it and continue on.

This was a public works project that yielded enormous benefits to the benefits to the fledgling nation.  American inventiveness and ingenuity were suddenly the envy and marvel of the world.  New York City became the preeminent port on the Atlantic, spurring competition in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia.  According to A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, in his comprehensive history of the hotel, the increased opportunities of transport led to a rash of hotel building throughout the United States.  Some estimate the Canal led to savings in transport costs of up to 95 percent.  People and goods had to travel by animal drawn wagon before the Canal was built.  If you consider that it was estimated that a team of four horses could pull one ton twelve miles to eighteen miles a day, depending on the road, but 1000 tons for 24 miles over water, you can see just how effective the Canal was in increasing commerce into the interior.  The accompanying surge in population to the Midwest was an added benefit to a country that saw itself with a Manifest Destiny.

I am intrigued, in this day and age when government spending on public works is attacked as wasteful, how much good this governmental outlay of capital on such a project caused so much good.  We are in a period where government can do no right, and certainly there were many doubters about the Erie Canal, yet the expense worked to the betterment of the nation.  I am especially intrigued because, probably even more than now, the country had an immigrant problem.  Hundreds of thousands of immigrants were flocking to the United States and settling in slums in major cities.  The construction of the Erie Canal allowed them to find work, as well as moving them out of the slums and into areas where they could settle.

In New Mexico, the state government is almost finished on a project called Spaceport America.  I almost see the idea as being analogous to the Erie Canal.  As the federal government ramps down its spending on NASA, there is a push for private industry to step in and fill the gap by providing service to the International Space Station and other space initiatives.  There is also expected an accompanying rise in space tourism.  When my wife and I took a tour of the Spaceport facilities, the tour guide was positively gushing about the private sector role, and very negative about government.  The message was that government doesn't do any good, and should stay out of the private market.  My wife was moved to remind him that without government spending, the Spaceport would not have been built at all, and that government spending can often spur additional private spending.  The guide then modified his rhetoric to agree, but then argued that government should then get out of the way.

As I see all the problems facing this country as I write, including a crumbling infrastructure, a large unemployment rate, and questions about immigration, I see a place for government spending.  I may be revealing my political stripes, and readers are free to disagree, but of course I live in a state that lives or dies by government spending on military bases and research, federal lands, and reservations.  But, it is very telling to me that some of the United States' biggest accomplishments could only come about by government being willing to spend money where a need was perceived, often regardless of how that expenditure was seen by the public, and often with spillover results that yielded benefits beyond the initial project.  I'm willing to admit that government is not always positive, but often it is.  Just look at the Erie Canal and its place in our history.

Musical Interlude

The Erie Canal song was written by Thomas Allen in 1905 after Erie Canal traffic switched from draft pulled barges to engine-powered barges.  It is a piece of nostalgia about loss of a way of life and change in an increasingly mechanized society.  In this version that I found, the song is performed by no other than Bruce Springsteen, off his tribute to Pete Seeger in his album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.  The song was recorded live in Dublin, Ireland which adds an additional link - at the time many Scots-Irish immigrants to the United States were employed in building the canal (there is also a recording of Springsteen doing the song in Belfast, Northern Ireland which would have been even more appropriate, but it is not as good as this recording).  This is the song that I sung in grammar school, but probably not as good as Springsteen and his band.

If you want to know more about the Erie Canal

Building the Erie Canal
The Erie Canal: A Journey Through the History
Erie Canal Museum
Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor
History of Building the Erie Canal
History of the Erie Canal
New York State Canals
Scenic Historic Erie Canal Sightseeing Cruises
Wikipedia: Erie Canal

Next up: Rome, New York