California Washes Into The Pacific Ocean

I’m sitting here watching Fox News and just shaking my head at the stories about the hysteria and damage caused by a little rain (by Georgia standards) in Southern California. Some areas have recently gotten nearly 9" and people are waterskiing down the street behind Ford pickup trucks out there today.

Since California receives most of it’s rainfall in the winter months, it would seem that their busy-body government officials and their government “licensed” civil engineers would be getting a grip on designing modern storm sewers to handle rainwater runoff. The California governments are obviously too busy passing Greenspace laws and outlawing logging and leaf blowers to pay much attention to such trivial matters as rainwater runoff and the resulting flooding it can cause.

I don’t mean to be insensitive to the suffering of the citizens of the left coast, but com’ on people—think about the situation for a minute.

We here in the Southeastern United states are required to design the structure of our homes and offices based primarily on wind loadings. Here on St. Simons, that would be a 140 MPH hurricane wind loading. We can thank Hurricanes Andrew and Opal for awakening the powers that be to revise the code upward from 110 MPH in the past few years.

In the northern areas of the country like Wisconsin, a combination of wind loading and snow loading controls the cost of the building structure. The roof isn’t supposed to collapse under a couple of feet of snow. They base the design on historical records of snowfall.

In California, seismic (earthquake) loads dictate the sizes of the wood, concrete, and steel found in a building. The codes were all re-written in the past 20 years and a lot of buildings have been modified and stiffened up as a result.

Aside from structural loadings, what is the common denominator of design in all areas of the world?

LOCAL RAINFALL HISTORY, that’s what.

Just ask the people in Bangladesh about the Typhoon in November 1970 .

“The greatest tropical system disaster this century occurred in Bangladesh in November 1970. Winds coupled with a storm surge killed between 300,000- 500,000 people. These cyclones usually cause the most misery, loss of life, and suffering in low lying areas in Bangladesh and coastal India”

Anybody out there but me know about that storm which happened before the existence of CNN, FOX, and the Weather Channel? I haven’t it heard mentioned once since the tsunami, which everyone is being lead by the news to believe is the greatest natural disaster in modern times.

Well, it was not.

Now back to the situation in California. I guess I don’t completely fault the homeowners, but, being an engineer, I have to wonder what the hell is going through the heads of the planning boards and the civil engineers on the southern west coast.

Like us here in Georgia, can’t they just take a glance at their metrological records and predict that they are likely to get ten or twenty inches of rain in a matter of days—once every fifty or one hundred years?

Well, now they know, and it will be interesting to see what, if anything they do to remedy the situation in the future.

In 1990 it rained 16” within 24 hours in my mother’s back yard and the river breeched the levee and flooded the town of Elba, Alabama 16 feet deep. As a result of additional floods in 1994 and yet again in 1998, the US Army Corps of Engineers just complete rebuilding the levee around town based on the new flood data. They also forced some people to abandon their homes and not rebuild in unprotected flood prone areas.

By the way, my Grandfather had the good sense to move himself and our family out of town onto a farm on nearby high ground in the early 1930’s as a result of a similar flood in 1929. We haven't had any problems since. See, intelligence runs deeply in my family.

So I guess the people in California will just keep on enjoying earthquakes, aftershocks, brush fires, floods, and mudslides in return for having the right to be near Hollywood and eat all the tofu that their stomachs will hold.

Well, they can have my share too...