"Floods are an act of God, but flood losses are largely an act of man." Those prophetic words were spoken by Gilbert Fowler White (1911-2006), who is known as the father of good floodplain management. White’s words should be a wakeup call for everyone involved in floodplain issues on the Front Range, and especially in Boulder, where Gilbert lived for many years .
If you look one of the flood impact maps that he created, you will see a perfect correlation to the horrendous disaster that has impacted Boulder and the current flood damage. Unless something drastic changes, the situation will just keep repeating itself. “Canute engineering” is what I call attempts to stop forces way beyond our understanding. As King Cnut of the Danes demonstrated in the 11th century, for man to attempt to command the tide is an exercise in futility and doomed to utter failure. The images of the recent flood damage in the Front Range aptly illustrate this—or, to totally misquote Ozymandias, Shelley’s king of kings: “Look on Flood Control works, ye Planners, and despair!” Looking at the monument created in Gilbert's honor just northwest of the downtown Boulder Public Library building, you really understand what that means.
Every civil engineer in Colorado should be ordering a copy of Living With Nature's Extremes: The Life of Gilbert Fowler White by Robert E Hinshaw and the City of Boulder should get his notes out from the Library where they are gathering dust and make them mandatory reading for every City of Boulder employee. Any engineer should know (but we often forget) that to survive a natural disaster you have to work with the forces of nature and not try to stand in opposition to them. The Quaker Meeting House that White attended on Upland Ave, Boulder. sailed through the flood without a scratch while all around it neighbors were flooded. Rather than attempting to stop flood waters with barriers, the building and grounds are designed to gently and smoothly redirect water flowing onto the property into the nearby drainage structures while slowing it down and absorbing as much as possible into the landscaping, and guess who we can thank for that.
( : ( : pete
Pete is a Civil Engineer from Africa ( where they have catastrophic floods every year ) who runs global pursuit of excellence programs in a wide variety of industries
