Conspiracy to Flood the Somerset Levels.

[Rolfe]

I've seen this scenario repeated over and over:

Disaster happens is investigated and steps are taken and procedures put in place to avoid it in the future, time passes and new people take over who do not remember the disaster and do not know why they have to follow proper procedures so they ignore them til: Disaster happens.

You followed the awful history of Foot and Mouth disease in England, then?

Rolfe.

 

[threadworm]

Or the disaster is caused because conditions are more extreme than your procedures can cope with as they were put in to cope with some lesser event in the past.

It's always a losing game.

There's an interesting aspect to this kind of thing in areas like southern Spain, where many dry river beds (arroyos) are usually spanned by bridges that are completely inadequate in terms of their design to cope with the kind of event that would fill the river (for older bridges its usually not enough space between arches to allow free passage of water).

Do you engineer a very expensive structure that would cope with a 100 year or even 1000 year event, or do you just build something that will cross the river bed cheaply and deal with the consequences if and when the flood happens?

 

[LSSBB]

There's an interesting aspect to this kind of thing in areas like southern Spain, where many dry river beds (arroyos) are usually spanned by bridges that are completely inadequate in terms of their design to cope with the kind of event that would fill the river (for older bridges its usually not enough space between arches to allow free passage of water).

Do you engineer a very expensive structure that would cope with a 100 year or even 1000 year event, or do you just build something that will cross the river bed cheaply and deal with the consequences if and when the flood happens?

First example in the US for me that comes to mind is Mission Valley, San Diego.

Here is one diatribe about it.

http://voiceofsandiego.org/2010/12/22/why-mission-valley-is-underwater/