It's not "Climate Change" causing catastrophic flooding, it's an environmentalist war on flood control doing the damage.

Flooding on Winooski River VermontPhoto byNBC Channel 5 News Montpelier, VT

The flooding currently besieging Vermont, especially the Montpelier area, has been caused by 8" of rain falling in a 24 hour period.

This has resulted in a record crest on the Winooski River of nearly 21', exceeded only by the flood of 1927, before the dam system was built in 1930, bringing much needed flood control.

However, Tropical Storm Irene moved through this area in 2011, dumping 11" of rain in the same 24 hour period, yet the flooding from Irene was a fraction of what is occurring today.

What changed?

Environmentalists and their allies on the Left will tell you "the climate changed."

In reality, a sober assessment reveals the dechannelization of the Winooski river, and the many tributaries to it, along with the removal of dam structures on the larger tributaries and the halting of bank stabilization projects along all the waterways has resulted in just what the environmentalist left has been clamoring for... a river reconnected to it's floodplain.

Rivers will carve their own course given the opportunity. This most often occurs over time, but in a flood event, the landscape of a major watershed can be altered overnight.

This is why the federal government embarked on a series of major flood control projects in the early 20th century that involved "taming" the rivers, by deepening their channels, straightening some sections of the river bed, then stabilizing the new banks against flood-driven erosion.

A deeper, straighter river channel can drain a greater capacity of water than can a shallow, meandering one. The idea animating these mid-20th century projects was to control the river near cities, towns and other infrastructure, then to permit it to roam in areas where the damage would be negligible.

But to the radical environmentalists, the river shouldn't be controlled, the people living near it should. All across this nation flood control projects are being dismantled, allowed to degrade and crumble, or failing that, are simply, purposefully mismanaged, making flooding a more frequent and damaging danger.

The operating manuals for these dams have been corrupted by a green-think that has moved flood control to the bottom of priorities, and habitat restoration to the top.

The most egregious example of this "to hell with civilization" attitude among natural resources agencies occurred along the Missouri river in 2011, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, (the agency responsible for operating the dams on the Missouri) deliberately ignored a record snowpack in the upper reaches of the river basin, knowing the thaw would bring catastrophic flooding to the entire watershed.

A wildlife biologist for the Corps told an environmentalist website in an interview that the Corps knew, but chose to do nothing, knowing "the flooding would return the river to it's natural state in one fell swoop."

I broke this story in 2011, and that article became the basis for a class action suit against the Corps by a consortium of property owners and farmers in Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas. The suit won an award of 350 million dollars, and will likely increase dramatically as the total costs of the Corp's reckless disregard for life and property is fully measured.

Montpelier, and the rest of Vermont, is getting exactly what their government has chosen for them - and these miscreants and malcontents are gleefully laying the blame at the feet of "climate change."

Already in Vermont, the cry to relocate entire towns, villages and even parts of cities is rising amid more than 100 water rescues in the last 24 hours.

Of course, all this will require greatly enhancing the regulatory authority of environmental agencies and their incestuous partnerships with radical environmentalist non-profits.

The utter disregard for human life and property exhibited by the "natural rivers crowd" is stunning. They are achieving through bureaucratic misconduct what they cannot achieve through legislation and open debate.

And all of us are paying the price for them to live out their fantasies of wild, free rivers, untainted by human hands.