Posted on 10/04/2024 6:03:24 AM PDT by george76
the lesson from Helene is the opposite from that being promoted.
In 1933, the Tennessee Valley Authority was given the mandate for flood control in the valley of the Tennessee River and its tributaries. Over the next 40 years, they built 49 dams, which, for the most part, accomplished their goal. Whereas floods in the Tennessee were once catastrophic, younger people are mostly unaware of them.
The French Broad River (Asheville) is an upstream tributary where flood control dams weren't constructed due to local opposition.
Rather than the devastation of Hurricane Helene on Asheville illustrating the effect of climate change, the success of the flood control dams in other sectors of the Tennessee Valley illustrates the success of the TVA flood control program where it is implemented.
Hurricane Helene did not show the effect of climate change, but what happens to settlements in Tennessee Valley tributaries under "natural" flooding (i.e. where flood control dams have been rejected.)
...
in its first 40 years, the TVA built 49 flood control dams, of which 29 were power-generating. In the subsequent 50 years, TVA built 0 flood control dams, However, in the 1980s, they established the Carbon Dioxide Information Centre (CDIAC) under their nuclear division, which sponsored much influential climate research, including the CRU temperature data (Phil Jones) and Michael Mann's fellowship from which Mann et al 1998 derived.
In 1990, the parents of Crowdstrike's Dmitri Alperovich moved from Russia to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where his father was a TVA nuclear engineer. Dmitri moved to Tennessee a few years later. One can't help but wonder whether TVA's original mandate for flood control got lost in the executive offices, attracted by more glamorous issues, such as climate change research.
If so, one could reasonably say that a factor in the seeming abandonment of TVA efforts to complete its original flood control mandate (e.g. to French Broad River which inundated Asheville) was partly attributable to diversion of TVA interest to climate change research, as opposed to its mandate of flood control.
FEMA will get a huge budget bump for doing such a crappy job in Western NC.
The TVA quit building dams in 1973.
in other word Asheville was destroyed due to a combination of government red tape, dei agendas, climate change fanaticism and “not in MY backyard” moronicism? good to know for the thinking American but for the inured...OH NOES! “failure to plan is a plan to fail” applies. history is repleat with examples of plans that fail to take real and actual HISTORY into account but instead rely on the best hopes of the people tasked with protecting the people. THEY HAVE FAILED!
Quite saying climate change!!! This is all pert of the normal 4K year cycle. Nothing has changed. And the biggist fallacy is claiming it is human caused. What an ego!
“illustrating the effect of climate change”
This is a damnable lie. Not to mention it contradicts the fact that flooding was prevented by dams. So there was flooding before.
Flood of 1916.. Only houses built deep in the mountain sides are standing
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4268668/posts
“FEMA will get a huge budget bump for doing such a crappy job in Western NC.…”
Why not pour money into FEMA, you can use it as a slush fund for anything else you want to do but can’t get on budget…?
Asheville, and the other communities, were destroyed because they built houses and roads in the 100 year flood plain and a 500 year rain event occurred.
Yes, this is exactly correct.
I’m 84, and grew up with the understanding that these dams were built to provide electricity for the area’s population and (mostly) the Oak Ridge Atomic facility.
More dams can’t be built on the French Broad because it would flood out the railroad tracks that run along side. I was told years ago when I asked about it that the railroad took precedence.
Agreed, although I'd change it to say, quite saying anthropomorphic climate change, which means man-made.
To point out FReeper EdgeOfDarkness' statement of climate changes being normal cycles, here's one showing the past few warming and cooling periods over the past 10,000 years (climate during the current Holecene glacial period).
Here's one showing the past half a million years. The squiggles on the far right are the graph above:
Here's one showing the past 2.4 billion years:
The de rigueur “climate change” blame is not helpful in legitimizing the essay.
There is a meteorological story behind Helene that I do not believe has been told. I I watched NOAA forecasting the projected path of Helene and as it came ashore the forecast was for the storm to move north into the lower Midwest. However, it did not have enough forward force to overcome a cold front that was moving east at the time. The cold front wrapped itself around the west and north reaches of the storm. The effect on Helene was that its northerly movement was halted and it actually started moving east toward the coast. The storm degraded to a tropical depression with about 20-30 mph winds but it still retained a huge moisture package. With its northerly movement halted it kept dumping moisture in the west Georgia - Tennessee and lower Appalachia area as it slowly moved turned east and slightly north. The storm stayed on land and slowly moved north along the east coast until it finally died out. It was not ‘global warming’ but a non-typical weather situation that created heavy rainfall in a the lower Appalachian chain with all its gulleys that caused one helluva wicked gulley washer of a storm.
What CAN’T climate change do?
Thank you.
BUMP
Rebuild up on high ground instead.
I-91 through Vermont is one road little affected by the floods that devastated much of Vermont.
That is because little of that road is built on low ground.
When it was built it was far cheaper to buy uninhabited woods land that happened to be high up than farm and housing land in the valleys.
So that's where the freeway went, which seemed odd at first, but has worked out great when it comes to floods.
In the winter there is more snow and ice to be dealt with at the higher elevation, but it beats having the road washed out.
This also explains the "lake effect snow" phenomenon around the Great Lakes, which is a major threat in the late fall and early spring but not during the coldest days of winter.
Why not build dams just for flood control?
Rochester, NY was devastated long time ago by terrible floods.
So they build a large dam on Genesee river at Letchworth State park.
The park contains unique “Grand Canyon of the East” deep gorge with several huge waterfalls, but the dam sits normally empty.
During the floods, the Grand Canyon of the East fills temporarily with water, up to the rim few times, the city is safe and temporal flooding does not hurt the nature!
It seems to me, that’s great example of protecting both people and nature!
But, given the present day environmentalist idiots, it would never be build now.
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