it'd be very difficult if not impossible to provide protection from flash flooding in the same manner as flooding from storm surge...whole different ballgame altogether...first, the terrain; many steep mountains w a narrow river valley running between them and many tiny tributaries feeding into a more major river such as the white...( using my area for an example as I know the topography pretty well) in addition to those numerous tributaries you also have many many more ravines, drainage etc that generally deal w the spring melt...in the case of irene you had all of those tributaries and normally dry ravines and drainages become quickly overwhelmed...once the volume builds and bank erosion and undermining begin, the only thing that is gonna stop it is running out of water to flow...( the r*in stops)...it was simply amazing to see what happened here in madhatterville in just a short time...I'll dig up pics...Mister Moose wrote:There is such a thing as managed risk. If Irene was in fact a 500 year storm, it makes little sense to armor all structures to that degree. For one, you can't armor all natural channels, two, that's how the earth as we know it was formed, three, when you build bridges with a 50 year life span, building them to a 500 year storm doesn't seem to make sense.Woodsrider wrote:I grew up with science not religion. So praying doesn't work for me. Planning does. Irene should be the new standard for VT perhaps taken into consideration for new construction...just like Sandy is for NY/NJ. Our storm barriers now must exceed Sandy's high water Mark. Homeland security is mandating it and paying for it for our critical infrastructure.brownman wrote:Advanced preventive planning for a weather event like Irene is near impossible.
You pray it's simply a 100 year event and go on with your life
From the work I have seen and am still seeing in VT, they are taking a similar approach to drainage. The roadways and bridges are much stronger now near rivers and a crapload of boulders have been laid at critical river bends.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But only if you let it.
where I had a 12inch culvert that spent 3/4 of the year dry, water was 4 ft deep, 6-10 ft wide and roaring over the driveway, the culvert well submerged... My dad owns property next door and he has a number of atv trails he uses to collect firewood...every one of them was flowing white water a foot or so wide and 4-6 inch deep...all of that of course leading to the 12 inch culvert...higher in the woods a spot that had maybe a 4 inch wide "flow" during the rest of the time I have lived here eroded a channel 3-4 ft deep and a foot wide when it was all said and done...the entire area along 107 is a giant watershed for the neighboring hills, our property being one tiny part of a system that occurs everywhere along the 107 corridor from stockbridge to the bethel bridge... where the branches of the white converge...
all that water HAS to go somewhere and most of where it goes and how it gets there is by natures design and on undeveloped land...the river can likely handle a lot larger flow now due to the massive widening of its reaches during irene but most of those ravines and drainages etc are just as prone to being overwhelmed and eroding during prolonged heavy r*in or r*in and melt, causing a blockage and then a torrential release when enough water builds up above it...you'd have to spend millions of dollars and hours and destroy thousand of acres of relatively untouched land and even then there'd be no guarantee...
are vt'ers worth it? see the fema thread where I asked that same question...how do the 600 people in my town justify the expense of the rebuild on the fed and state dime...and should we be allowed to...in the end 107 got back together pretty much the same as it was ( IMO still vulnerable to flood) and things went back to the same ol same ol for me, others were not as fortunate...at the time it seemed like the expense of building a new 107 wasn't worth the expense and effort for the number of people it served...me being among those people...