txags92 said:
BrazosDog02 said:
FM 949 said:
As an engineer, I tell people it's not if you will flood, it's when.
This river is going to flood again, it will be worse than before, people will die. It's been happening for thousands of years. Over 100 people died this time and not all of them were idiots. The best we can do is the best we can do and the next best thing at the moment is flood alarms. Will that work? Probably better than nothing.
My expectation is that for the flood sirens to give adequate warning to those downstream, they are going to have to go off when the water first starts rising by more than a few feet. I expect that they will go off so often for what turns out to be minor flooding that people will start ignoring them like they do with Tstorm and flood alerts on their phones. Hopefully I am wrong, but I expect complacency to set in again in a relatively short period of time.
Absolutely, then they will make adjustments to them for only extreme cases, and we'll be having discussions about why the city failed it's people. There is no amount of ''prep" that will give everyone adequate warning and if it does they won't follow it. I keep going back to Hurricane Harvey and watching the models for 50" of rain being completely dismissed 14 days out. 24 hours out many still thought "We've never seen this before, and it's not likely." So what happened? People lived on their roof for 3 days and drowned in their attics.
As stated, humans are really poor at risk assessment, and those that are not poor at it are generally first responders who are trained to understand it. Even when we do understand risk, we fall back to what we know and when that fails, it fails in a large way as we have seen here.
