I got more, baby. For you.

You guys are insatiable, ravening beasts, lusting madly for more, more, more of my opinions about water. Billo asked me about flood control in New Orleans. I have no idea. My deep fascination with the physical world pretty much stops at the Sierras. My understanding of how water works definitely ends at the Rockies. Truth is reversed on the far side of the Rockies, nothing I know can be counted on. Water falls from the sky in the summer! Enough to water your crops without irrigation! Foliage is green in the summer, brown in winter! Vegetables are expensive! Water runs uphill! Day is night! Parties aren’t fun!

Instead, I’ll tell you that we had some flood control engineers from Holland come out and tour our levees. Then they gave a very neat talk on their public participation process for choosing flood control projects. They had this supercool model interface; you could click on each of seven hundred potential modifications to the river and see how it changed the river’s flood heights. Your job was to spend about $2B on about twenty projects and see if you could lower the height of the entire river during floods. They passed out thousands of copies of this model, so that citizens could see for themselves what combinations were effective and how fast you could burn through $2B. Then they held public meetings to jointly select the projects they would build. People got very involved, they said, and resolutions were remarkably not acrimonious.

I thought the process sounded really neat, although I had a number of critiques*. It is a big step up from how we do things, where we give the public a short time to express themselves in meeting, and no real ability to change policy outcomes. But my favorite part of the meeting came when the Dutch engineers said they thought our economic models should take the indirect benefits of flood control and levee repair into account. Why, they said, if you could count the indirect economic benefits of guaranteeing a water supply to Los Angeles in your models, you could justify any levee repairs you wanted! You could patch them with gold! That was very funny, and a room full of engineers and economists laughed out loud. And this, Justin, is why I don’t tell funny stories on my blog.





*Well, yeah. If you can get everyone in the room to believe one model, you are two-thirds of the way to agreement. I also didn’t like that their model engine wasn’t transparent; only other sophisticated water modelers could understand it and appreciate the influences of the assumptions the original modelers made. And, it is easy for them to choose projects. Their rivers are stable; the projects could well be useful for decades. Here, there’s a good chance of doing an expensive project and having your river wander away from it in the next few years to threaten somewhere else. Still, I liked what they did, and wish we could adapt it for here.