As of this writing, at least 110 people are dead with 161 missing as a result of the July 4 catastrophic flooding of the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, Texas. Next door in New Mexico, three people (including two children) were killed on July 8 after a 20-foot wall of water moved through their town of Ruidoso.

Appearing on Fox News Channel on July 7, Republican policy adviser Karl Rove blamed the large number of deaths on the lack of flood warning alarms on the Guadalupe River. On the same day, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick vowed to use state dollars to have an alarm system installed. The problem is that the Guadalupe's waters rose 26 feet in 45 minutes between 4 AM and 6 AM on July 4. River sirens—in addition to useless warnings from the National Weather Service—don't have a prayer of preventing hundreds to thousands of future deaths because the real root of the problem is not being addressed.

How did millions of Americans—despite almost a century of government anti-flood efforts—come to live, work, and even recklessly build Christian girls' camps in potentially dangerous flood-prone areas?

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927

Destructive flooding—from Illinois to Louisiana—occurred between April and May 1927. Enter progressive Republican and then-US Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover. Hoover launched a relief campaign that greatly increased the power of the US Army Corps of Engineers to implement supposed flood protection throughout the US. The campaign was followed by the Flood Control Act of 1928.

While the act led to the construction along the Mississippi River of one of the most impressive systems of levees in the world at the time, the great irony is that the new system certainly did not control flooding. While the new levees prevented flooding in some areas, they quickened the current of the river, which led to flooding in other areas. Other unintended consequences were environmental damage from reductions in some of the natural soil deposits along the river and an altering of the natural flow of water into the river's flood plains.

Less than a decade later, the Great New England Flood of 1936 affected states from Maine to New York. Driven by a two-week deluge of water, it helped drive the passage of the National Flood Control Act of 1936. This act—much more than the one of 1928—spurred a massive boost in centralization.

Besides doubling the size of the federal flood-control program, it moved Congress away from regarding floods as principally a local matter and providing relief to only the hardest-hit areas. It effectively enlisted the federal government and Army Corps of Engineers in the battle against floods anywhere and everywhere. According to the New England Historical Society, the Army Corps built "hundreds of miles of levees, flood walls and channel improvements. The Corps dammed approximately 375 new major reservoirs."