Wisconsin Law Blog

This story has many personal angles to me. First, before I was a personal injury, I was a real estate lawyer, with an expertise in flood plain and Wisconsin Shoreland laws. My first published story in a legal publication was on the Wisconsin Shoreland law.

Second, I almost bought a home on Lake Delton’s sister lake, Mirror Lake in the early 1990’s. Third, my sister owns one of those struggling businesses in the Wisconsin Dells and also owns homes on Lake Delton. Fourth, one of my best friends lost his home from the same series of storms, although in a different state, a different river.

Floods and nature’s water in the wrong place is perhaps the part of our planet that man has the least control of. Hurricane Katrina, was more a problem with flooding than with the storm itself. I have loved water, the beach all of my life, but if you don’t respect its power, listen to those who understand hydro engineering and insure against the unforeseeable, you just can’t invest adjacent to it.

But ultimately, all of these floods are foreseeable, all to some extent avoidable. The cost: infrastructure. All of the costs of our political corruption, corporate greed and encouragement to the consumer to push blindly ahead of the last 10 years in our political and economic world, the failure to take care of our infrastructure may ultimately be the most costly. Last summer, it was a bridge collapsing over the Mississippi. In 2005, it was the levees in New Orleans. The warning signs are always there. Yet, Galveston still is unprotected, three years after the Category V that just missed it. Roads collapse, a lake is drained – a jewel of Wisconsin’s economy, destroyed.

The federal government bails out the mortgage business, but the lifeblood and backbone of our world, our roads, our levees, our planning, are pushed back for another day. Perhaps if it was the Potomac, Washington would start to care.

Attorney Gordon Johnson
http://gordonjohnson.com
http://wis-injury.com
©2008 Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.