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by workusername
3736 days ago
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I'm not going to read the article because the question as a title suggests to me that the journalist could have done more research. That aside, this reminds me of the UK which regularly has floods in winter, and droughts in summer. Now if we have too much water in one season, and too little water in another, surely it's not too hard to figure out a common solution to both. I call it a "dam". Are there reasons the UK doesn't do this? Too much focus on trains? |
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If only we had expert engineers on civil projects, civil engineers if you will to look at this stuff eh.
1) We don't have that many rivers that would suit having a dam put in.
2) We are very densely populated, daming a river would require moving large numbers of people (time consuming, costly and likely to end up in court).
3) The areas most effected by drought are the south-east, they also get way less rainfall in summer and winter than the north-west which floods a lot more.
http://www.coolgeography.co.uk/GCSE/Year11/Weather,Climate/R...
4) Population pressure on water is vastly higher in the south east than in the North and south west.
5) Assuming you could dam the rivers and have a water reserve the most sensible place to do it would be the north-west, you then have to get the water hundreds and hundreds of miles down into the south east (which has been proposed but moving water is expensive relative to it's commodity cost, a 1m cube of water ways exactly 1 tonne).
6) The UK idea of a drought is very different to what most regions would call a drought, only in the absolutely worst years do we go beyond a host pipe ban and even then only for a few weeks.
7) Given the population density and the difficulty of moving vast quantities of water you'd need to put the dams in near to the densest population since the human impact of a damn is proportional to the population density that's not great
8) Dams cause widespread ecological change (sometimes a net benefit sometimes not).