[pm90]

This seems like a misleading title. The article itself is pretty great and I would encourage folks to read it.

The engineers did solve one problem, that of the flooding in the metropolitan city center and they did it pretty well. The transformation the author mentions is the side effect caused by hauling all that water away instead of letting it sink into the ground and replenish the water table. That's another problem, and now the engineers can solve that too.

Damming rivers across the US kickstarted the US economy after the Great Depression but also lead to unintended consequences (depleted water supply downstream, silt buildup near dams etc.). It is the nature of engineering to solve one problem at a time; only an Oracle could forsee all possible consequences of engineering works.