Weather, Climate, Environment, and Energy

[847badgerfan]

To clear all the floodplains, you would have to relocate about 70% of all urban areas.  But you are correct, levees built to hold back water in one area increase the impact on the areas up and downstream of the levee.

I know I'm correct. I do floodplain work for a living.

The entire Mississippi is constrained by levees. Start there.

[Cincydawg]

Just remove the levies and then what?  Would this not mean moving millions of people and thousands of buildings and cost hundreds of trillions of dollars?

[847badgerfan]

There is a whole lot of real estate between Minneapolis and New Orleans that is uninhabited or sparsely populated.

[betarhoalphadelta]

And just how do you propose this? There's a bunch of sparsely populated real estate, yes. With no homes. No schools. No infrastructure. So all of that needs to be built from scratch.

And then what? You just tell people they have to move? Who pays for it? What if they refuse? What if the people who *aren't* in floodplains don't want to move out of the city they know and love but everyone else is being forcibly evacuated?

I respect your position that these cities should never have been built where they are. But sometimes the cost of changing a situation far exceeds the cost of dealing with the floods when they occur.

[Brutus Buckeye]

Tired of Hurricanes? 

Come on up to Tornado alley. 

They may be more frequent and deadly, but they have a much narrower path of destruction. 

[847badgerfan]

And just how do you propose this? There's a bunch of sparsely populated real estate, yes. With no homes. No schools. No infrastructure. So all of that needs to be built from scratch.

And then what? You just tell people they have to move? Who pays for it? What if they refuse? What if the people who *aren't* in floodplains don't want to move out of the city they know and love but everyone else is being forcibly evacuated?

I respect your position that these cities should never have been built where they are. But sometimes the cost of changing a situation far exceeds the cost of dealing with the floods when they occur.

You misunderstood my point. The point is that there is a lot of land protected by levee that does not need to be.

[betarhoalphadelta]

You misunderstood my point. The point is that there is a lot of land protected by levee that does not need to be.

Ahh. I thought you were talking about moving people out of floodplains in very populous areas.

[847badgerfan]

In certain areas (New Orleans is first on the list) I would propose doing that. Not only do you have storm surge risk, but you have floodplain risk from the Mississippi and surrounding lakes.

Hurricane Katrina cost $250 billion (estimates vary but this is on the low side). Roughly 400,000 people live there. That's $625,000.00 per person - and it's not done yet.

Terrible decision to rebuild those parts of the city (around 90 percent of it) that are subject to inundation.

[Cincydawg]

The French Quarter did not flood, or so I was told.  

Downtown NOLA looks like most downtown districts today.

They recovered.  They aren't going to move.  It may be fine in theory, but it simply is not going to happen.

Cincinnati isn't going to move either.

The dikes will stay in place.  Maybe some protecting farm land could be eliminated, but the flood waters may reach towns if that happens depending.

[847badgerfan]

Right, and at the time, I told anyone who would listen that the FQ could stay, but the rest, not so much.

I walked away from a very lucrative project (West Closure Complex) with the Army Corps of Engineers because I didn't believe in what they were doing. My partner about killed me but I just couldn't be a part of it.

http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/

All that money and it still won't solve the problem if something more than a Cat 3 hits NO again, or a rain like Houston just got, or back-to-back heavy rains, or or or...

This is not sustainable. Doing something for nothing is what they did. We need to do something for something.

Doing nothing would have been better in this instance.

[Cincydawg]

You likely are right in some ideal scenario, but it just won't happen.  Nobody is seriously even talking about it.

Control is going to be the attempt even if it fails on occasion.

Downtown Cincy would flood every couple of years without the levies and the pumps for the Mill Creek.  With those devices, it never floods.  Of course we don't have hurricanes, though Hurricane Ike did a surprisingly amount of "dry damage" with high wins a few years ago, no rain, but very high winds.

[rolltidefan]

The cost to rebuild much of Houston and flooded TX and LA communities will be enormous.  I don't think one can count on going another 12 years before the next major hurricane hits the US and this repeats.  Not sure what the answer is.  There's a reason why there is so much industry along the Gulf Coast and lower Mississippi.

it might not last another 12 days. irma is a cat 3 and still in mid atlantic. lots of uncertainty on path still, but decent chance it moves into gulf and makes us landfall, likely as a high cat 4 or cat 5 if it does that. this one has a chance to be a monster. also a chance to skirt the east coast and do little to nothing, though.

[847badgerfan]

You likely are right in some ideal scenario, but it just won't happen.  Nobody is seriously even talking about it.

Control is going to be the attempt even if it fails on occasion.

Downtown Cincy would flood every couple of years without the levies and the pumps for the Mill Creek.  With those devices, it never floods.  Of course we don't have hurricanes, though Hurricane Ike did a surprisingly amount of "dry damage" with high wins a few years ago, no rain, but very high winds.

Yet.

[MichiFan87]

The whole Houston / Harvey situation was discussed on the Energy Gang podcast (GreenTechMedia.com) this week. One of the regular hosts, Jigar Shah, who founded SunEdison and now has a company that invests in renewable energy projects, is a staunch proponent of not redeveloping places like the Gulf Coast when they're ravaged by hurricanes and other natural disasters, and I tend to agree. It's absurd to me that they apparently have minimal regulations on how they develop their land, and apparently there are many instances of homes that have taken advantage of flood insurance programs to the point where they have gotten paid a multiple on the value of their homes.

There's an electricity topic on the unmoderated board, so I'll try to keep my thoughts on energy there. The big news of late in that world is the DOE report that Rick Perry asked for that was recently published, and the continuing demise of nuclear projects, particularly in the Southeast.