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from
Valley Spring Times, March 6, 2002
Help Save Our Wetlands
by Mandy Wong
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One autumn the Gomez family moved into their brand new dream house. They loved their cozy home and their new, growing neighborhood. Then, in the spring, a flood destroyed their basement. The water made huge cracks in the basement walls and ruined the house’s cement foundations. Their dream house became a nightmare after they made an upsetting discovery. They were living in the middle of a wetland.
When you hear wetland, do you picture a huge, dark swamp? Most people do, yet many important wetlands are small and some are wet only in the spring. Buildings fill in these tiny wetlands, often less than a half acre, and put houses on them. Homeowners are then faced with cracked foundations, collapsed walls, and houses that are sinking.
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Actions taken by some builders, farmers, and land developers endanger families and damage the environment beyond repair. Between 1985 and 1995 more than one million acres of wetlands were lost to farming and development. There are many good reasons why our lawmakers in Congress must act now to stop this destruction.
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Even tiny wetlands help control floods. In the spring, snow melts and heavy rains pour down. Wetlands soak up this extra water like sponges. Then they release the water slowly, preventing floods. If you build a house where a wetland used to be, the spring waters have to go somewhere so they flow into your house.
In the 1990s many homes in the Mississippi River Valley flooded. The floods caused 15.7 billion worth of damage. Farmers and builders there had filled in more than 17 million acres of wetlands. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that these destroyed wetlands could
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have prevented the floods. The wetlands would have held enough water to fill a thousand football fields four miles deep.
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