Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
An essay on control of flooding
research on dams
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
dikes
817 Words2 Pages
Recommended: An essay on control of flooding
“When flood waters from the Mississippi River and it’s tributaries surge down the river the volume of water is physically impossible to contain. In general, there is just to much Water!!
“The “pools” behind the navigation dams have no effect in preventing or causing floods. Like a bathtub it doesn’t matter if the pools are empty or full when the floodwaters come. Within a very short time the excess water can create an over flow (Army Corps of Engineers).”
What is a Flood?
A flood occurs when water is poured over the land and the ground and rivers cannot cope with it (Waterlow 8). Once a basin has filled, water will overflow its rim and resume it’s downward progress. “Gravity ensures that water must drain the land into the sea (Allaby 12).” When snow melts from a divide it is joined by more snow, and it will eventually reach the low lands. Hills down below will also shed water into the same low lands and if there is enough of this it can result in a flood (Allaby 12). The Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio drain an area of 1,243,700 square miles, this goes from the Rocky Mountains to the Canadian boarder and Pennsylvania (Allaby 13). All of this watershed result in floods each year the snow up north melts.
How a Dam Affects Flooding
A dam is made to make pools at least 9 ft. deep so that barge traffic can navigate freely through out the river. A lock is made so the barges can move from one pool to another (Army Corps of Engineers). The combination of these two make up a lock and dam system. Between St. Anthony Falls, MN, and Granite City, IL there are 29 lock and dam systems. It is said, in the beginning of this page in fact, that dams do not control flooding. Dams weren’t made to control floods and they never will, because floods are so unpredictable and so uncontrollable (Army Corps of Engineers).
What is a Dike
A dike is an embankment built to control or hold back the water of a river, stream, sea, etc. (Waterlow 25). In building a dike you can use sandbags, dirt, or both put together. You will build up a wall, getting it as compact as possible, as high as you think is needed to hold back the floodwaters. In the Netherlands farmers have used dikes to protect their farms from floods for hundreds of years (Waterlow 25).
Related
Water in the San Joaquin Valley
2901 Words | 6 PagesThe primary purpose of Friend dam is to help regulate the flow of San Joaquin into available uses of its environmental, wildlife, and farmer’s impacts. The dam controls the flow of water delivery where it needs authorization first before the schedule can release any delivery waters into canals, steam, and wild life habitats. There will be agreements and many protocols to do with it first to avoid unnecessary spilling. There are 5 release schedules which include quantity of water available, time water, flood control requirements, release schedules from storage reservoir above Millerton Lake, and water user requirements. These benefits of flood control, storage management, modification into Madera and Friant-Kern Canals, to stop salty water from abolishing thousands of lands in Sacramento and throughout San Joaquin Delta, as well as deliver masses of water into agricultural lands in 5other counties in the San Joaquin Valley.
Rhetorical Analysis Of John M. Barry's Rising Tide
505 Words | 2 PagesContemporary writer, John M Barry, in his passage from Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, seeks to communicate the extraordinarily perplexing river that has a life of it’s own. Barry illustrates the incomprehensibility and lifelikeness of the Mississippi, and how that makes it so alluring, by establishing it as far superior to all other rivers.
Construction and History of the Marshall Ford Dam
1409 Words | 3 PagesIn December 1936 the United States Department of the Interior authorized the Lower Colorado River Authority to construct a low dam at the site of an old crossing on the river known as Marshall Ford. Marshall Ford Dam was completed in 1941 through the collaboration of the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) and the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) of Texas. The original purpose of the dam was to prevent floods from devastating Austin, TX. The capital city had substandard heavy damage from previous floods since its establishment in 1846. Soon bureaucrats came together to create the Colorado River Project, wanting to create a series of dams along the Colorado River to create hydroelectric power and serve to control floods and droughts. With Buchanan dam well under way with a total of six planned Marshall Ford was the only dam designed primarily for flood control and the only dam in which USBR oversaw construction. With money scarce there was debate over the final height dam and it reservoir capacity. This issue resolves itself with the flood of 1938. Once completed Marshall Ford Dam would flood 65 miles of the Colorado to form Lake Travis, creating the largest of the seven reservoirs known as the Highland Lakes.
Hydrosphere of the Mississippi River
407 Words | 1 PagesHow is the Mississippi controlled ? How & why used ? Benefits Problems Levees Mounds of earth are built parallel to the river, along its banks. These contain the rising river in flood times and protect buildings along the valley on the flood plain behind. · Known & successful technology which follows nature (rivers deposit silt to build natural levees anyway) · Protect settlements ·
Dorothy Case: A True Healthcare Professional
1916 Words | 4 PagesThe South Fork Dam collapsed and unleashed 20 million tons of water from its reservoir. A wall of water, reaching up to 70 feet high, swept 14 miles down the Little Conemaugh River Valley, carrying away steel mills, houses, livestock and people. At 4:07 p.m., the floodwaters rushed into the industrial city of Johnstown, crushing houses and downtown businesses in a whirlpool that lasted 10 minutes. (New York Times, 1889).
Colorado River Hydrosphere
877 Words | 2 Pages20 dams have been built, many of them by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, along the River and the tributaries. The Hoover Dam, which holds back at the Black Canyon to form the reservoir Lake Mead, one of the largest artificial lakes in the world. The Glen Canyon D... ... middle of paper ... ... nts for profit along the river's course can hardly complain when a river flows where it's supposed to go.
Grand Coulee Dam
789 Words | 2 PagesGrand Coulee Dam is a hydroelectric gravity dam on the Columbia River in Washington State, built by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser It is among the most famous dams in the United States. The reservoir it created is called the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake. The reservoir is named after the United States President who seemed to love dams and hydroelectric power and who was involved with the project through to the final completion of the dam. The dam was built as part of the Columbia Basin Project as a way to irrigate the desert areas of the Northwest United States. The dam started during the 1930s as a public works project and finished toward the beginning of World War Two. The initial construction plan was reconfigured during construction for more height. Its height was determined by the point at which the water from the reservoir began backing up into Canada. The scope and size of the dam is hard to comprehend. It is over a mile long and taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza, in fact, all the pyramids at Giza can fit within the base of the Grand Coulee Dam. The dam is so large that a truck at the base looks like a toy, this creates some perspective into the dam's true size. When the dam was completed in the early 1940s it was the largest dam in the world.
The Deterioration of the Colorado River
1463 Words | 3 PagesThe Colorado River is formed by small streams created by a huge amount of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains. The ecology and flow of the river varies highly by region. The river is divided into two different regions, the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin. Beginning in the early 1900s, western states began to build dams in the Colorado river, diverting the water flow to fast growing cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix. The river now services over 30 million in the southwestern parts of the United States and Mexico (Patrick 1). Diverting the water of the nation’s seventh-longest river may be seen has a great accomplishment, however to others this is a great crime against nature. Over the past couple years the river has been running significantly low, since a drought has come up the southwest. At the lakes edge, “bathtub rings”, lines in the rock walls, can be seen showing the decrease in water level. It is recorded in some areas of the river that the water has lowered 130 feet since 2000. Some water resource officials say those areas will never be filled back to normal. The surrounding states must adjust to living with less water or further actions need to be taken to save the river’s water. There has been some talk about adding water to the river to replenish the river but nothing has hap...
Memphis Tennessee Floods
883 Words | 2 PagesThere are several well-known flooding that have affected Memphis, Tennessee such as the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the 2011 Mississippi River flood, and storms that caused street flooding’s like the ones in 2008 or 2010. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was caused by extremely heavy rain which swelled the Mississippi river to its water carrying capacity. People tried to prevent the flood in Memphis by fabricating and fortifying levees to expel water from the land; although, river water began to seep through the sand bags, which were meant to keep water out. The Memphis Fire Department trucks had appeared at the breaches and pumped water back over the sand bags. Despite valiant efforts, the river overran the levees and caused massive amounts of damages and deaths, which would affect hundreds of people. Once again, substantial rainfall was the catalyst to several flooding’s in Tennessee, including the 2011 Mississippi River flooding. This flood reached over forty-eight...
From Little Falls to Major Power Producer: A Brief History of the Post Falls Dam
1490 Words | 3 PagesIce dams in the Clark Fork area that backed up Glacial Lake Missoula actually caused some of the largest floods known to man. As ice will float, these ice dams would periodically rise up and burst, catastrophically flooding the Rathdrum Prairie, eastern Washington and into northern Oregon. Locally, these floods brought in glacial till and deep deposits of outwash that obliterated the St. Joe River once running through the Rathdrum Prairie. The southernmost edge of these deposits terminated where Coeur d’Alene exists today, damming the old St. Joe River and creating Lake Coeur d’Alene (Alt and Hyndman, 73). The new lake received the entire flow of the Coeur d’Alene and St. Joe Rivers, more than could be absorbed through the gravel deposits, thereby causing the lake to overflow and seek a new course, now known as the Spokane Ri...
The Water Supply of Florida
1582 Words | 4 PagesThere are numerous stages that take place simultaneously in the hydrologic cycle and this includes evaporation. This is when the water alters from a liquid state into a gas. The damp air from the water rises into the atmosphere and when it cools, the vapor condenses and shapes into clouds. But those billows are not the only form the vapors make; it can also materialize as dew, fog and mist, which blanket the Earth, characteristically on a rainy or humid day. Evaporation takes place when water changes from a liquid state into a gaseous state, and ascents out of the pores of the earth and into the atmosphere as a vapor (“How”). While evaporation is taking place, condensation is also occurring. When the temperature in the air plunges, the clouds become heavy and as a result they relieve themselves of the extra weight, which is called precipitation. This produces rain, hail, snow and sleet, conditioned upon the temperate. As the precipitation falls, it enters the surface of the ground and percolates into the soil, which is called infiltration. The more porous the land is, the more the infiltration can take place. However, the ground cannot hold all of that water and floods. The excess rainfall, which is also called runoff that has not been absorbed makes its way into bodies of water, such as small ponds, rivers, lakes and parts of the ocean (“Summary”).
The Colorado River
1680 Words | 4 PagesOne of the largest geographic physical structures in the United States is the Colorado River. Human activity and its interaction with this great river have an interesting history. The resources provided by the river have been used by humans, and caused conflict for human populations as well. One of these conflicts is water distribution, and the effects drought conditions have played in this distribution throughout the southwestern region. Major cities such as Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other communities in the southwest depend on the river. It provides water for over 20 million people, irrigation for 2 million acres of land, four thousand megawatts of hydroelectric energy, and over twenty million annual visitors for recreation purposes. Also, once in Mexico, the river provides water to irrigate half a million acres of farmland, and municipal and industrial water for 2 million people living in this delta region. The river distributes its flow from lakes and canals along its journey as well. Due to climate change, human demand, natural forces like evaporation and human-induced climate change this water supply is in conflict. Also, a recent change that began in March of 2014 will bring a temporary water surge to the delta of the Colorado River for the first time in many years to help restore this region, and it’s possible it could reach the Sea of Cortez once again.
Johnstown Flood
1184 Words | 3 PagesThe state offered to sell the canal, the railroad company bought it for the right of ways yet had no need to maintain the dam, which due to neglect, broke for the first time in 1862. McCullough stresses that man was responsible for the dam and its weaknesses nearly thirty years before the great flood as he explains how the initial repair work was carried out by unqualified people and how the discharge pipes were blocked up.... ... middle of paper ... ... McCullough makes a firm argument for the responsibility of man, and asserts the blame on the necessary people, therefore I feel he makes a fair and accurate assertion which I would agree with.
Simulation of Drainage System using XPSWMM
1321 Words | 3 PagesOver the years, many damages related to flood have been reported. In France, floods have killed more than 100 people in the last 10 years. In less than three years, two catastrophic flash floods struck southern France. The first flash flood occurred in November 1999 and the second flash flood occurred in September 2002. The two flash floods cause 58 fatalities and properties damage of around 2.3 billion of Euros (Vinet, 2008). In United States of America, flash flood that occurred in June 2001 has cause $2 billion of damages to the urban states in Texas (Holder et al., 2002). All of this damages and loss serve as frightening examples of the threat that flood possess.
What Are The Effects Of Urban Flooding?
1468 Words | 3 PagesIn addition, the total volume of water discharged during a flood tends to be larger for urban streams than for rural streams. For example, stream flow in Mercer Creek, an urban stream in western Washington, increases earlier and more rapidly, has a higher peak discharge and volume during the storm on February 1, 2000, and decreases more rapidly than in Newaukum Creek, a nearby rural stream. As with any comparison between streams, the differences in stream flow cannot be attributed solely to landuse, but may also reflect differences in geology, topography, basin size and shape, and storm patterns (Konrad and Booth, 2002).
More about dikes
Water in the San Joaquin Valley
2901 Words | 6 PagesRhetorical Analysis Of John M. Barry's Rising Tide
505 Words | 2 PagesConstruction and History of the Marshall Ford Dam
1409 Words | 3 PagesHydrosphere of the Mississippi River
407 Words | 1 PagesDorothy Case: A True Healthcare Professional
1916 Words | 4 PagesColorado River Hydrosphere
877 Words | 2 PagesGrand Coulee Dam
789 Words | 2 PagesThe Deterioration of the Colorado River
1463 Words | 3 PagesMemphis Tennessee Floods
883 Words | 2 PagesFrom Little Falls to Major Power Producer: A Brief History of the Post Falls Dam
1490 Words | 3 PagesThe Water Supply of Florida
1582 Words | 4 PagesThe Colorado River
1680 Words | 4 PagesJohnstown Flood
1184 Words | 3 PagesSimulation of Drainage System using XPSWMM
1321 Words | 3 PagesWhat Are The Effects Of Urban Flooding?
1468 Words | 3 Pages