Coffee's Ready, Come and Sit on the Porch

[FarmerJamie]

It's so sad, those young ladies and others still unaccounted for, are in my prayers.

How can a river rise 26 feet in 45 minutes? That's just insane for a midwesterner to try and grasp. Was there a dam failure, or truly that much rainfall?

Jesus is Lord and Christ

12+ inches of rain in a specific area, topography funneled all of that rain down that river. 1990 in Shadyside Ohio, a rain storm parked in a location and caused a flash flood killing 26.

The unfortunate thing is the rain is often mi
les and miles away upstream in the watershed and the victims have no clue of the rain. I have seen it visiting Colorado and locally here, but not to this extent.

 

[flowerbug]

How can a river rise 26 feet in 45 minutes? That's just insane for a midwesterner to try and grasp. Was there a dam failure, or truly that much rainfall?

arid landscapes and no flood controls. you can construct all the dams you'd like in such areas and they will help for a short period of time (the sediments build up behind the dams pretty quickly) but it takes green and growing things to build the capacity to absorb more rains as compared to bare dirt with mostly scrub on it.

even with a vibrant and green thick forest with feet of subsoil you still will have troubles with such massive amounts of rain in a small area.

a really good approach to helping things out would be to encourage beavers to return to such rivers as possible as they provide natural water management services and will spread and soak as much water into the ground as it can hold. at the cost of losing some river bottomlands that are currently being used for grazing or maybe not being used at all in the arid regions... there's always tradeoffs...

oh, and yes, beaver dams do get washed out by storms like these, but it is still some buffering and protection and eventually they will rebuild without charging us for it.