🚀 go-pugleaf

We have strayed a little far afield.  The thing that kicked this all off
was the fact that a whole bunch of people and people-related land uses got
badly flooded earlier this year.  I have seen nobody opine that this was a
good thing.  And I suspect that, regardless of what he or she may feel
deep down inside, nobody is going to 'fess up to holding such an opinion.

So the question is what we do about it.   One alternative is to just say
that we just shouldn't try to plan for a flood this large and with this
long a recurrence interval, so we should just leave things as they are and
take our chances.  The other alternative is to try to fix it.

The conventional way to try to fix it is by what has been for many years
the method followed in dealing with flood events; to wit, provision of
reservoir storage to reduce the rate of flood flow, together with
improvements to downstream channels to enable them to safely carry the
reduced flows--the structural solution.  In my opinion, that's a pretty
good solution.

The Friends of the River posted a paper by a Dr. Williams.  In that paper
he proposed an alternative approach--the non-structural solution.  It was
significantly lacking in specificity, but in broad terms it seemed  to
involve allowing a large area on the floor of the Central Valley to revert
to its natural state as a flood plain, and to find more flood control
storage space by preempting storage now allocated to water conservation. 
Dr. Williams promised "...greater reliability and ...lower cost."  but
failed to provide any quantitative demonstration of the validity of that
contention.

Dr. Williams was identified as a professional engineer (but with the
particular engineering discipline and specialty  therein unidentified). 
Considering statements such as "With only a small amount of flood storage
available it is inevitable that these dams will overtop (sic) in a large
flood or be unable to handle successive small floods," it is hard to
believe that his field of expertise is water resource engineering.

Mr. Paul, identifying himself as a professional engineer (from his
comments seemingly one within whose field of expertise water resource
engineering would fall) responded in support of the thought that there
ought to be a rather large structural element in any solution.

Then Mr. Paul got hammered.  He got hammered for his views.  He got
hammered for having expressed them in a manner that some found intemperate
(but I might say that I found some of the responses to Mr. Paul also to be
rather intemperate).  He got hammered with "Look, Maw, see what a clever
fellow I am" type one-liners.  He got hammered with factually questionable
statements by authors who demonstrated no qualifications to make such
statement.  The example I found utterly mind-boggling was a somewhat
incomprehensible juxtaposition of safe yield and levee heights and
setbacks.

I think I would tend to be on Mr. Paul's side, but I retain an open mind. 
My request to those of you on the other side is, if you have a viable
non-structural alternative, tell me in detail what it is, tell me what it
will cost, and tell me how it will work.  Tell me what you are going to do
with the people and improvements which already occupy the area you propose
to rededicate to natural flood plane.  Tell me what you propose to do with
California agriculture.  Tell me what you plan to do about vested property
rights in the agricultural usage of water.  Tell me about ***all*** of the
considerations that have been swept under the rug in your postings to
date.  And, most definitely, demonstrate to me your qualifications to
formulate, evaluate and report on such a plan.

Thank you.

-- 
Dave Powell
dopowell@alumni.caltech.edu