Re: The elephant in the water pipe?
So putting generators in the rivers and organizing things to generate electricity and avoid flooding
Avoid flooding how? The only way to do that is to build a reservoir to hold the water upstream, which means trading unplanned flooding downstream for planned flooding upstream. Given the size and flow rate of the Mississippi when it is flooding, that reservoir would have to be massive. Who is going to pay to buy out all those landowners and build this massive artificial lake (whether permanent or used only during floods) to your north? Maybe they would rather have the reservoir further north instead, but the further it is from where you live the less effective it will be in actually preventing flooding.
Plus that would give people a sense of complacency and think they can build in places where they know they can't build today because it floods all the time. I have a reservoir upstream of me (on a river much smaller than the Mississippi, but which flows into it) and everyone assumed we would never have a flood. We've had two in the past 30 years, including one where the water level in the reservior was 5' above its max capacity - i.e. 5' of water going over the spillway, so the river flow was 12400 cubic feet/sec instead of the "maximum" the dam was capable of letting out normally of around 2500. Result: flooding all over town, including a lot of newly built areas that "will never flood".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
