When you build a country on a flood plain, it floods. How weird is that?
Low-lying Bangladesh floods often. The country is built over the flood plains of three major rivers, the Brahmaputra, Meghna, and Ganges Rivers. The three rivers converge in Bangladesh and empty into the Bay of Bengal through the largest river delta in the world. The flat land within each flood plain is fertile, and the country is densely populated. As a result, floods on any of the three rivers can affect a vast number of people. When all of the rivers run high with monsoon rains and melting snow from the Himalaya Mountains (the source of the rivers), much of Bangladesh can be under water.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=15682
History has not taught the CLB any lessons if they use flooding in Pakistan or Bangladesh as examples of ACC.
I always wondered where exactly floods occur, now I know! In flood plains!!!!
And yet we keep building on them… rather than moving somewhere else we geoengineer levee systems and dykes…
Yeah, those levees really saved New Orleans didn’t they…
My biggest argument with a government official was the logic of allowing construction in flood areas. The containment measures are built to a minimum standard that is based on extrapolating records from a short recent period of time.The theory was that floods are only a problem if you do not have sufficient insurance and build retention basins that are designed to massively fail when the flooding exceeds the capacity, leading to more damage than if the basin was not constructed.
The local government hired the consultant so they could live with the plans drawn up.
Levy systems and Dikes or flood retention basins are a waste of money and a disaster waiting to happen. There is enough High Ground to move the population to higher ground out of the flood plains and use them for crops.
The ancient Egyptians were a lot smarter — they lived in the highlands, and farmed the flood plain between floods. They invented surveying so the same farmer could have the same field year after year. I often wondered if they could slip the surveyor an extra tenner, and have him widen their plot a few feet.
The Egyptians and a lot of other civilizations were able to learn from history. Something it appears we are not able to. The main problem is we think our technology is more powerful than natural events.
The nice thing about the flooding of Bangladesh’s rivers – the delta has been increasing the land of Bangladesh negating the effects of the minor amount of sea level rise (from 1943 to 2008 the country gained nearly 1,800 square kilometres of new land).
See: http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/Bangladesh.htm