> would have resulted in a similar result as the evacuation for Rita
Except that some of the roads people spent 24h on are now deep under water. So you can imagine a real disaster as millions of stuck people were overrun.
Let's beat the metaphor to death. They opened the valve because there was a fire below that needed to be put out. Better to deal with flood damage than lose the whole enchilada.
This is a joint effort between our government and the biggest telcom Telefónica (and project Loom), in response to a series of floods that affected last year (mainly) the northern parts of the country due to El Niño phenomenon.
> back in 1992 this only affected 3 million people, and now it's 30 million. The population of the country only doubled over the same time span, so it seems like this year's flooding is easily five times worse than before
> Cameron was years ahead. In the 1990s, preparing for his flood experiment, he built a big ditch at the edge of the property to hold the extra water. (“We didn’t get permits or anything, and I should probably be in jail, but we just had to try it,” he says.)
Not sure if anyone else saw this clip on the Rachel Maddow show, but it was interesting. Seems like the last time something this massive happened (in much shallower water), the same techniques were tried (and failed) and finally, relief wells were the solution - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmhxpQEGPo
> Preaching "floods don't exist!" to the exhausted people who are watching the river subside after slinging sandbags for three days.
Alternatively, many who were caught in the flood washed up safely on the shores, returned back to town to see people ripping down their houses to build barriers against the flood that they thought was the end of the world.
>it will be more water on a hillside than many of those hillsides can bear
A good example was the Oso mudslide. Nearby Darrington gets 80 inches a year. (Twice as much as Seattle!) March 2014, a storm drops 3 to 5 inches on soil saturated by six months of rain, and a hill lets go. Killed 43 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Oso_mudslide
1. Was looking for a place to rent near tech companies here in brazil, one house was obviously heavily modified to withstand floods, all doors were made of aluminum, there was in multiple places tubes to get rid of water, raised platforms for expensive objects and so on. Asked realtor about it, he said the area used to flood often, but all that stuff was a relic of the past, because there was no flood last year so he was sure it wouldn't flood again.
2. I rented another house, place didn't look like a floodable place, it flooded anyway because there was river channeled under the house, when there was rain in another town upstream the river managed to gush out of the drains and become above ground along its original course, cars on the street even floated away. My stuff got destroyed so I asked the realtor why he didn't warn me, he replied that last flood was 20 years ago so he didn't think it was relevant because he believed it wouldn't ever flood again...
EDIT: just to make clear, these was two different realtors, also although both places was in same city, they were in wildly different areas.
[0] https://blog.x.company/helping-out-in-peru-9e5a84839fd2
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