Posted by Andrew Zajac at 4:50 p.m. CST
The flooding that’s shut down Justice Department headquarters all week may have been inevitable. Long before the federal government became Big Government, Washington DC was a manageable design of Pierre L’Enfant, who had a canal built to connect the Anacostia and Potomac rivers.
His idea was that farm goods from the Ohio Valley would come to DC through the Potomac watershed, down the canal, to a deep water port on the Anacostia.
But progress, in the form of railroads and better roads, eclipsed the canal’s transport function and the waterway saw new duty as a sewer, as well as a source of flooding and pestilence.
People at a high pay grade eventually decided to fill in the canal and call it Constitution Avenue, but the area retained its status as one of the lowest areas in the District.
So when a 300-year storm parked itself over the region last week and dumped about a foot of water on Washington, the city’s sewers, at least those in low-lying areas, gagged.
They spat up at least 10 feet of water into the sub-basement of the Justice Department and other buildings along the same stretch of Constition, including the IRS and the National Archives, also had water coming in over the gunnels..uh, make that, pouring into basements and sub-basements, according to Mike McGill of the General Services Administration.
At this point, the plan is to keep the department closed and drying out through Wednesday, and thence, in the words of a DOJ press release: “We hope to begin phasing in some organizations and employees to the Main Justice Building by the end of next week.”
