This is something I know a fair bit about. If you don’t build in areas susceptible to flooding in the first place (including but not limited to wetlands), you don’t need to engineer around nature. And it turns out that our engineering design floods are not keeping up with real floods, so all that engineering is not really helping.
Plus, engineered structures need regular maintenance and we are generally not all that great at infrastructure maintenance. See the Libya damn disaster for just the mort recent example.
If you don’t build in areas susceptible to flooding in the first place
It was access to one of your most incredible natural resources and methods of transportation, and that’s simply a non starter. Water is know if not the most critical resource we have accessible to us. People congregate near it for very good reason, and that’s never going to change.
Plus, engineered structures need regular maintenance
Yes, and those resources are absolutely critical again, for both maintenance during floods and for making sure people have water through droughts. They will never go away and they will always be required.
