Laserfiche WebLink
<br />5 <br /> <br />tickets after the police posted signs indicating that the road was closed. The <br />police actually had to stand in the water in waders and give people tickets for <br />crossing the flooded, barricaded road <br /> <br />Gruntfest <br /> <br />ImpONance of Low Tech Measures <br />and Environmental Cues <br /> <br />During the 1993 MississippilMissouri River floods, in spite of advanced <br />hydrological and meteorological models, we were quite dependent on low- <br />tech adjustments such as sandbags and local knowledge. Data from the <br />sophisticated hydrologic models from the National Weather Service, private <br />meteorologists, and the Corps of Engineers were all constantly available and <br />the local people kept tabs on them. But, there were still numerous difficulties <br />with timeliness. <br />People needed to know what the impacts of the five inches of rain <br />currently falling in Kansas City would be at downstream Hermann, Missouri, <br />later in the day. Or, what if an upstream levee did not hold? The most <br />accurate information for the person who needed to know whether or not he <br />or she would be able to cross the Missouri to get to work was provided by <br />local knowledge and a very low tech measurement device: a measurement <br />stick in the river that was checked by people sitting on a bench by the river <br />or by word of mouth passed along by the road department employee who <br />stopped at the cafe for a cup of coffee. <br />While the Mississippi flooding experience was radically different from the <br />Big Thompson flood in terms of lead time, the crucial roles of environmental <br />tech <br /> <br />cues, common sense, and local knowledge are as important in our high <br />environment as they were 50 years ago. <br />For the thousands of people who enjoy the beauties of flash flood-prone <br />canyons, common sense remains essential. They must interpret the environ- <br />mental cues of a river getting louder, getting closer to the bank, and the rain <br />falling harder than usual, and then abandon their cars and climb to safety <br /> <br />New Scientific Collaborations <br /> <br />Flash flood information is available also from some unusual partnerships <br />Remote sensing efforts at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration <br />(NASA), combined with the work of geographers at Dartmouth College, keep <br />an up-to-the-minute archive of global flood events on the World Wide Web <br />(http://www.dartmouth.edu/artsci/geog/floods/index.html).This archive has <br />unlimited potential for keeping up with events for educational purposes and <br />providing lessons from flood experiences elsewhere. Before this website was <br />