Tuesday, June 17, 2008

You can't put 10 gallons in a 5 gallon bucket

People are wondering why there is flooding along the rivers in central United States. With development over the years and building closer and closer to the rivers. Placing bridges over rivers in narrow areas of the rivers blocking the rivers flow in high water years. It's just common scenes you can't put 10 gallons of water in a 5 gallon bucket. Placing levees to hold the water back where the river would have expanded during the high flood years causing the rivers to flow up rather then out in the flood planes. If you go along the rivers you'll see the river high mark areas but for some reason people keep saying, "it won't happen here" when it does flood. People just don't get it that if you build on a flood plane you're going to get wet.

Watching the pictures of the water on the news you can see the bridges near over topping. If you look at that banks of the river there's a long slope except where the bridges are which are build right up to the shore lines of the river, restricting the water flow.

Instead of building the bridge at the high water line they build it at the low water line and figure that the water can flow under the bridge. Mainly it's cost that they do this, cheaping out projects to save money, again saying, "It won't happen here." Well it happened here and is going to continue to happen here as long as you try to fight mother nature and global warming.

My best analogy which I used in several other papers I wrote is, "It's like building a house on train tracks, eventually a train is going to come along."

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