Flood Prevention for Dummies

wetlands and flooding

Our research team here at the Antisocial Network pores over dozens of possible DotD nominees every day. One of the first steps in the nomination process is to categorize the particular form of dumbassery the writer expresses in the content, forms such as "failure to understand the damned question in the first pace." Well, at least that's reason we picked out Andrea Helaine and the piece at HomeSteady.com titled "How to Prevent Floods of Rivers."¹

Yes, that's really the title, though it's not Helaine's fault: eHow just scraped search terms and "dropped" the titles unchanged. On the other hand, Andrea should have realized that her approach to the question was pretty stupid. You see, although Helaine started out by telling her readers that,

"Floods can be caused by a number of factors, like heavy rainfall, runoff, over-saturated soil, frozen soil, high river levels, ice jams and even urbanization..."

...she then spent the entire remainder of her post explaining how to sandbag a river bank. We submit that, to be honest, Andrea answered the unasked question, "How to prevent a flood from destroying our town." For that question, she provided a reasonably good answer, most of which is gilding the lily because the local authorities already know how to do that.

No, Helaine's real answer was even covered in her sole reference, but she ignored it. Her answer should have addressed flood prevention: you know, topics such as preservation of wetlands, soil conservation practices, and proper balance of permeable and impermeable surfaces in urban areas. All that's hydrology, watershed management, and urban planning – topics her reference touched upon.

But all Andrea seemed to have read from her reference was a short list of possible causes of floods. Heleaine didn't address those and the steps we can take to prevent floods or at least mitigate their potential damage. Instead, she gave us a half-assed civil defense lesson. Small wonder she's today's Dumbass of the Day, eh?

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_7826805_prevent-floods-rivers.html

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