How Floods Work

any flood that happened on the news. It just I think I happened across it searching randomly in a thought. It's a good one. Look cover with that one. Yet flooded stuff always creeps me out. Oh yeah, yeah. I think it goes back to my days in Toledo as a young boy. Um many times growing up in my house on Beverly Drive, there were there the mommy would flood and um my basement would flood as a result, and times it would come all the way up to

like the top step. Really yeah, I just think about like all my dad's tools down there like underwater, and it weren't supposed to be. It was just really creepy because you just opened the door and step on the landing and then there's just water. You can kind of see like the top couple of steps that was, you know, suggested all the other stuff that was down there. So I think since then, I've always been fascinated and creeped out by the idea of things that are supposed to

be above ground submerged like ships. When we talked about the Bermuda Triangle, like down there in the trench never to be found, Like, yeah, that's creepy. Yeah, the same thing with floods. Man, it didn't It doesn't creep me out like that, but I get it, okay, so um chuck, Yes, I take it you're familiar with flooding. Do you remember the one in ninety four done in Albany, the Great Flood, the Flint River flood. Oh man, it was all over the news like they were like, um, in Albany, Georgia,

don't remember. There were caskets, like four hundred caskets were loosed and we're just kind of floating around. They were. They had this weird tendency to congregate towards trees or around trees, and um they some people started lashing into that because they had to have a court order to even grab the caskets, but apparently it was the second worst cemetery disaster in the United States. Couldn't find I was in Athens at the time. I was. I was not up on it was a big it was a big,

big thing. I'm surprised, but it was really creepy. You can see pictures of like caskets just kind of floating around. Um. Yeah, they recently found a human school that they think was part of the remains that was moved by the flood. Yeah, it's amazing how out of the news loop I was while I was in college. Yeah, because it was pre Internet. Yeah, I didn't get the paper. I was in college. Who gets the paper and reads it? I knew people who

sold the paper. I didn't have TV, so yeah, I knew about class and working at Maskalie Grill and sleeping late and all of the kinds of things that I can't talk about. That's awesome. I remember the Gulf War that happened, well because of the Internet, that um came after your college years, like two decades after your college years. Um. You can see video of the news footage. You're fine stepping back in time. I will do. Well. Let's talk about flooding chuck um. First, I guess to understand floods,

we need to give a brief primer of the hydrological cycle. Yes, we do, if you ask me. Uh, there's been about the same amount of water on Earth for a long long time. Yeah, I thought this was fascinating. Yeah, but it hasn't always been in the same place as we know, and it's not it's not the same water necessarily. There's a constant loss and gain of water. Yeah, every day you lose water, obviously to the atmosphere where like um, uh, the solar rays and other cosmic radiation just blasts water

vapors into like nothing, You're gone, You're by longer water. Sorry, as that is going on. Volcanic activity in the core or not the core necessarily, but in the inner Earth is releasing water and it about balances out on a day to day basis. But did you know that volcanoes released water? Sure after I read this. Yeah, we even did a Hot Volcanoes Work podcast and I don't remember

talking about it releasing water. But when water is generator introduced into the upper Earth in the atmosphere, it comes from volcanoes of volcanic gas is water vapor, so it about it balances out on a day to day basis, which is pretty remarkable. Yea, almost as if it's happening

that way for a reason. And are you familiar with the anthropic principles that we'll talk about it sometimes, right, Oh, it's not directly relating to this, No, it's about the concept of why everything is so falling and has fallen so perfectly into place that we are able to notice this and say, wait a minute, it almost seems like we're supposed to be here, right, And the anthropic principle is like, yeah, and there's like five million other worlds

out there that didn't happen like that, so we aren't there to say, wow, it's almost like everything fell into place, so we're supposed to be here. Interesting, we'll see. You just told me about it right now. Trick to you. Uh. Water can be all around the earth in three different forms,

as everyone knows. You have liquids, rivers, oceans, lakes, uh, rain solids we've talked about and this this kind of collects a lot of our podcast in a way, like the clouds and the and now we're talking about the Antarctica. Lots of frozen water at the falls the Antarctica, or it can be gas which is water vapor in the air. Yes, and it's all moved around by the wind thanks to the sun. And remember, I can't remember which podcast we talked abo and whether it was the sun or clouds

or something, but wind is created by um. The exchange of air is warm air is heated at the surface and rises cooler air rushes in to fill that vacuum.

There's your windpal Yeah. And then well, once that warm ay rises, though, it's also going to get colder and form little droplets of water which form together to form clouds, which we went over in fluffy little clouds, right, Yeah, because the the sun um heats the ocean surface, that evaporates, like you said, it rises, forms clouds, and then eventually those clouds become pregnant with rain and rain falls down. Right. As the rain falls down, it fills waterways, rivers, streams,

that kind of thing underground um. But for the most part, some of it does go to phil aquifers and that's storage, but the vast majority of it makes its way back to the oceans where the process begins again and everything is complete in the circle of life. That's right. The cool thing here is wind is pretty consistent across the globe. Wherever you live, your weather is pretty consistent. You might think if you live in Atlanta, like, oh, that's crazy

in December here at sixty degrees. But by and large, if you look at the big picture, your weather systems are pretty consistent on a day to day basis, although in the case of flooding, anything can happen on any given day to knock things out of whack. Right, So you have, um, a storm comes about, a thunderstorm, and you're like, wow, it's a pretty bad storm. Um, because you are capable, your area is capable of experiencing a storm. Your area is capable of experiencing a freak storm, like

a huge thunderstorm. Sure that dumps so much precipitation on on the ground in such a short amount of time that these normal waterways that have been formed to hold the normal amount of water become overwhelmed. The water fills up, spills over the banks, and there's your flood. Yeah, And that's the key what you just said there is these waterways they form over a great, great period of time. You don't a river doesn't just spring up over the course of a year. Because there's a lot of rain,

it takes like of several years. It takes a long long time to sort of get a feel I guess of how much rain there is generally, And so this is how big I'm gonna be if I'm a river in Georgia, exactly. This is all I need to be, except for the freak of currenc in. Oh my god, now it's a flood. But then after a flood, it goes right back to where it was before. It's not Rivers don't tend to plan their size for the worst case scenario. They're very lazy. That's a great way to

say it, lazy lazy rivers. UM. So, like we said, the the most common cause, the one that people are most familiar with. Um. The most common cause of flooding is um, a large storm that allows a an anomalous accumulation of precipitation. Yeah, with rain, could be uh, melting ice from a mountain or snow, but rain is the one we think about most often. And like you said, because weather and patterns are pretty um, pretty stable over time. UM. In a lot of places, depending on the season, you're

going to get anomalous normal precipitation, right, like monsoon's seasonal flooding. Right. So with the monsoon, um, you have in the winter time, the air over the land is colder than the air over the ocean, So the air over the ocean is rising in the air over the land is moving out to fill it up, so that that means the wind is blowing out toward the ocean's uh. In the summertime, the opposite is true, and so the wind is blowing in toward the land and that brings with it the

monsoon rains brings with it water and this annual monsoon flooding. Um, we talked about it. We didn't call it that because we're not that small, aren't. But in the how of the Nile River works, yeah, exactly, it was. It was and still is a very big part of their how they thrived over the years was they knew that the Nile would flood each year and extend the water out and when it waters were seated, that left a nice

fertile banks on which to live and plant foods. And remember we talked about some of the problems from the Aswan Dam and other dams that they built along the Nile to control flooding. Basically say we're gonna release this amount of waters and go crops year round and people aren't gonna lose their houses to the nile flooding every year. Um. That is actually one of the big causes of flooding too. Damn breaks. Did you see that damn video I sent you.

I didn't have a computer. You didn't look. You didn't see it on your it was flash. Uh it's really neat. I'll look at it later. I can't remember the name of the damn, but it's in Washington State, And in October of this year. UM, it had like a controlled demolition and they just blew a hole in the bottom and all of a sudden, this water search comes pouring out and fills this area up, and then it starts to recede, and you see the water behind the dam just start to go down as the water in front

of the dam starts to go up. It's really neat looking not to check that out. Or if you're from Pennsylvania or a historian, then of course you know about May thirty one nine, the Johnstown flood. Um And it wasn't just Johnstown by the way, It's known as the Johnstown flood, I think because that was the largest town that it flooded, but it was I think fourteen miles up stream from Johnstown was the South Fork damn, and

it hit a couple of towns on the way. Finally hit Johnstown, Uh six to ten inches of rain in twenty four hours, to the tune of a sixty ft wall of water going forty miles per hour wow, rushed through town. UH twenty million tons not gallons, twenty million tons of water. And it was the first big disaster

relief effort by the Red Cross. Yeah. Um, I got a number of two thousand, two hundred nine deaths, UH seventeen million in damages, which would be over four hundred million dollars today, like close to a half a billion in damages. And Springsteen fans might remember that from the song how We Patrolmen. These sings about the Johnstown flood

really folk hero, He's all over it. We also remember we talked about in the Human Caused Earthquakes episode the Viant Damn in Italy, a landslide caused a wave to go over the dam and killed two thousand people. That seems to be the number when a damn breaks or for each two thousand people die. You know what I think it's cool is after having done like four hundred plush shows like the our world is starting to narrow

a bit. You know what's really crazy, What is we've already had this discussion and now we've come back to having it again. That's really narrow Well. I just think it's cool when you do a podcast on flooding and it's also one about the Nile in clouds and volcanoes, and I mean, we're still a long way from covering yeah, the sun, We're a long way from covering everything. But our world view is narrowing in a good way, and

now we're like men and knights. Um Land plays a big part because you know, you can have a lot of rain, but depending on what kind of land it's falling on, it's gonna affect how much it floods. If it floods at all, like the soil in the middle of a forest, it's gonna really soak up a lot of water. Hard clay or rock or obviously concrete and asphalt aren't gonna soak up much if anything, so that's

gonna lend itself to flooding. Yeah, and um, agricultural lands, crop lands that have been tilled, they're more prone to flooding than woodlands. Do you want to know why? Yeah? Why I was wondering. You got that. We're about to circle right back again. But to earthworms, that's exactly why. That's why woodlands don't flood like farmland because there's more little passageways from earthworms. Yes, and if you till cropland, if you till the land has a a deletrious effect

on the earthworm popular that word like that. Yes, the earthworm population in the area, they basically leave, they take off, or else they're cut in a bunch of pieces. So it does have a very delus effect. Deletrious, deleterious. What is it species that called out big time? It's species. It's deletrious. It's not deletrious. Um say talk about species. I was wrong on species because it's there are two

acceptable ways of saying that. No, there's a right way species. No. No, if you look it up, it says species or species. I can't say anything. I can't even keep track of the difference between I and I and me. Concrete an asphalt, which I mentioned Josh here in the western world. There's a lot of that going on. If you go to a city like l A, which I lived in, as you know, Uh, they have these concrete flood relief channels built in. You don't even have to go to l A.

You can travel there via the movie Greece. Oh the like the l A River basins that what that is? Yeah? Okay, yeah, that is in T two. It's in the movie Them and These that that you know, the where they have the car, they called it the l A River, which is kind of funny. Yeah. Um, before they paved it with concrete. Um, they used it for the canoe scenes and a lot of the Tarzan movies in the thirties. It's all just smoking mirrors. Mash was in Malibu for

God's sakes. Um Levies Josh are another reason it can flood, as we all saw with the disaster with the Katrina New Orleans when the levee breaks, as Robert Plant said, got no place to stay. No, you don't. And do you remember earlier this year when they purposely opened the Morganza spillway. Yeah, basically they sacrifice some local crop land for a lot more downriver. And that's one of the points, like the reverse of the thinking usually or it has

been historically. Well, that's the point they make about all levies though, is generally they're great for that area, but there's generally there's gonna be a problem on down the line at some point. Well, the same thing with concrete storm basins. It's the same. It's you're you're basically just saying, all right, let's get the water through here, and then when like the tower base runs out your county line,

you handle it, and here's your flood county, but beneath us. Well, what I couldn't find about the Morganza spillway was the the effect, Like I saw like a hundred articles on the fact that they're going to open it up. And then the only article I found Poe releasing like I think it was first time since nineteen seventy three they opened up a lot of these gates, was like a week after they said, well, it doesn't look like it's going to be as bad as they thought. And that's

all I found. If it's the one I'm thinking of, it was a huge cluster that was on the Army Corps of Engineers. They they created an incorrect estimate and it really screwed up a lot more land than they thought. If it's the same one I'm thinking of. It was this year last year. Yeah, it was spring when the rivers were rising, and they said, we can't devastate New Orleans again, so we're gonna open up a lot of these gates, like up in like Missouri or something. Right,

No, no no, no, it was in Louisiana. Okay, Well, there was one in Missouri where they let the levy loose um and flooded some crop land and it ended up like screwing things up all the way down or over to like Tennessee. I can't remember, so I guess that's those are two different stories. So if you live in Louisiana, I like to know the effect because I know they said it wasn't as bad as they thought, but I couldn't really get a pinpoint of the damage. And I

want to know what happened in Missouri. Okay, okay, uh, let's talk about the coastline. Yeah, and we didn't mention, by the way, um hurricanes too, tsunamis. Yeah, tsunamis hurricanes big problems um as far as creating flood conditions. But yeah, the coastline Um, you're talking about levees and dams. They fall into man made ways of diverting water to other people's problems. Um, And we've figured out ways of I guess,

protecting our beautiful coastlines from mother Nature. And that's building walls, basically walls. It's like, have your worst waves, You're not gonna erode this beach. But the problem is is the whole process of erosion is part of creating and keeping beaches healthy. Yeah and beautiful. Yes. I remember I used to go to Hunting Island, South Carolina when I was a kid, and my mom went not too long ago, and she said that they have actually, like the whole

coastline is different now. For when I was a kid, they had they had to move a lighthouse inland because it had eroded so much. But they just, you know, they let it happen because it is a natural part of beaches, and it's a natural like oceans, beaches, rivers, they're all dynamic, right exactly. You know, they're all gonna move earth and water and that's just the way it's supposed to be. And when humans step into try and

prevent that, bad things can happen. Well, and we try to prevent it because we tend to settle near water. It's um, each transportation it puts living on the beaches nice. Well yeah yeah, but I mean even with the river too, it's like there's your crop land. Yeah, there's your easy access to irrigation, easy transportation, um food water obviously, so we need to live near water. And then when these natural processes happened and takes our houses the way, we're like, okay,

let's figure out how to how to solve this. And sometimes the solution is just kind of exacerbates the problem, that's right, or creates a new one. Yeah, So we

just gotta figure things out. I think we're working on it. Uh. This is one really cool part I thought was you always see how you know a flood, floodwaters will wash a car away or something, and it doesn't even look like that much water, and you think, you know, I drop my I drive my truck like through a river in the North Georgia Mountains and you just plow right through it and that's like twice as deep and really

rushing river that nature take that nature. But the difference here is I thought, this is really interesting, is is water what water wants? To do is level itself out. So when you've got a lot of water from a flood in a place where there's previously no water at all, it's gonna want to find its level as soon as possible by rushing really hard. So it's just gonna be a lot more force than the steady stream of a river. It's really easy as that, and that's all there is too.

So like a couple of feet of water can wash a car away, two ft two ft of water in a flood condition where it's rushing from one from a higher higher level to a lower level it's balance out can wash a car away, and six inches under those conditions can knock you human off his or her feet. And that's how people die in a flood. Well, I think half half of the deaths associated with most floods are from people trying to ford a rushing um uh

water in their car, sill away in their car. That's the problem, because you get carried out and you're in your car and you're trapped, and that's that. That's that. It's very sad. Flash flooding the most dangerous of all floods. Yeah, this jogged my memory when they was talking about um, Big Thompson Canyon, Colorado. I think we might have hit on that at some point because it jogged my memory too.

You want do you want to talk about? Well, yeah, in nineteen seventy six, July one, Colorado was celebrating its centennial and at about five or six o'clock it started rain and it was a really weird thunderstorm that didn't move. It just planted itself for four hours over Big Thompson Canyon. Ranged twelve inches in four hours, and that's how much the area gets in a year usually. I mean, yeah,

that's crazy. In four hours and uh, a twenty ft high uh rush of river going about fourteen miles an hour by nine pm washed through the canyon, and it was so like out of nowhere, which is what a flash flood is. It's not like, hey, you know, with the Johnstone flood, they had warnings even though people didn't heed them, and most of the times you know a flood's coming. But with a flash flood, they were just

like trapped. Plus they're they're also just happened to be thousands of campers down there celebrating this centennial of Colorado. It was well, the perfect storm, but the river that feeds the canyon. Normally Big Thompson River um is apparently normally pretty slow moving, the old Big Titty, but because of this flash flood, it was dumping two hundred and thirty three thousand gallons eight d two thousand liters of water into the canyon per second per second, so that's

a lot. So basically, a flash flood is like a flood, but it's even more concentrated and the water is moving even more violently. That's crazy. I got the number between a hundred and thirty nine to a hundred and forty five dead, five were never seen again, four hundred cars, four houses, and forty million, which would be about a hundred and fifty million today. And interestingly, and three years ago, this one guy was found alive in Oklahoma that they

thought died. He got he left town that morning and like didn't tell people, and I think they were that came up in records and he was like, no, I'm I'm out here in Oklahoma. I'm just fine. I didn't he didn't even realize that he was on the death list. But they still room every July thirty one, they still

pay remembrance. Obviously, in Colorado Um, there's also I mean, you think about cars being washed away and people being knocked off their feet and being flooded in canyons, But there's also a lot of problems with flooding after the fact, Like a flood brings with it a lot of silt and mud and nastiness, sewage, sewage, and um. When the floodwaters recede once again, Um, all that stuff sticks around.

Apparently Florence, Italy suffered a pretty big flood on the um Arno River, right, Yeah, And Florence, of course is one of the great repositories of Renaissance art, and a lot of the repository in that repository were basements and for stories, and that stuff got flooded. And apparently they got a lot of the stuff back to at least good quality, a lot of it, but they were I

looked up. There were six hundred thousand tons of mud and sewage after they left, fourteen thousand works of art and a hunt um sorry, three to four million books and manuscripts and records. And I don't know how many of the fourteen thousand were restored, but I bet it wasn't you know what I'm saying. Yeah, because a lot of stuff was completely destroyed. That's awful, very sad. At least invading hordes didn't set it on fire on purpose.

Also killed about a hundred people, which you always hear about the artwork, like I had to really research to find the amount of deaths. Really Yeah, well, well not that much research, but a few extra clicks, I guess. Um, and then disease is another big problem to you said, sewage, chemical, um, the deceased, All of this is mixed together and albany. That probably was not a fun soup. No, So if you are if your area is flooded, you want to basically boil any water that you're going to drink or

drink bottle of water. Um, get one of those one uh the water manufacturers that sucks the water vapora of the ambient air and converts it to bottled water. Did you hear about the Nettie pot deaths? Recently? These two people in Louisiana died and they believe it was from using the Nettie pot, which I use on a daily basis, and it got they got a brain eating amiba into their nasal passage from using contaminated water to Nettie with

and my friend. You know, I've been netting for like six years every day, and my friends drew bout that I would do that. Who are you? It's like, come on, did your friend know that he sounds like that? When you say I was, I was aping him. He sounded much more intelligent than that. But I'm not gonna stop knitting. Well, you have to boil the water, at least yourself that you're going to do that, chuck brainy eating ambo would not look good on you. I'll take my chances, all right, Okay,

I guess that's it. I got nothing else. I got nothing out flooding. Do you want to call out for anything in particular? Yeah? Sure, if you live in Big Canyon or or Johnstown or a story. Yeah, I bet you got some some personal anecdotes the family member. Man, yeah you can. Oh wait, wait, we haven't done less your mail yet. Man, we're about to jump the gap. Were you? I thought you're about doing that. It's about

like give our email. Well, if you want to learn more about floods, you can type in floods in the search bar at how stuff works dot com. And I said search bar, So it's Chuck's turn for a listener mail, Josh, I'm gonna call this uh request for Adam to save birds before this table? Your request of what request from Adam to help save birds before the bowl? He has he has a thing going on and it ends at this bowl, so we want to get it out. I

come to humbly beg a favor. Guys. He said he could apply us with beer if his loyalty is not sufficient. In this case it is sufficient. I don't know beer canunail my NGOs fundraiser needs a plug. We are the Alamos wild Lands Alliance. I'm the research director there and we are trying to create a reserve in a rare habitat. We also do research and education in a remote part of northwest Mexico. We run a biological field station called

the Navopatia Field Station. You can check us out on Facebook and our website is www dot Alamos wild Lands dot org. That is a l a MS wild Ds dot org and it's a US based nonprofit. It's very small, run by volunteers. Most of you says, run by birds, run by birds and put the second in a row. They're doing a fundraiser called the Bird a thon and it's like a walkathon, but instead of miles walked, people get pledges for the amount of bird species they see in a given day. My team had a hundred and

sixty three last year one day. It's pretty good. It is a fun way to raise money for conservation in a place that is unique and rare. That runs from January February. We often have a Super Bird Saturday when most people go out the day before the Bowl, which is a football game played here in the United States, American football and not here a people, not soccer or the rest of the world football. Yes, uh more. Teams

are always welcome. We have at least eight now, though some have yet to register, and anyone can start their own team or just donate. It's really easy and it's on our website. The money goes to a good cause is text deductible. And here's something sad, josh uh, the environment and animals only get about two percent of charitable giving worldwide. I have to be honest, I'm surprised that the environment and animals And he says, yeah, so humans

get the other nine percent. I guess so, which, you know, charitable giving us good no matter what. But forget about our free creatures. Attached our some pictures of my team, the Luca Doors. We wear masks and capes while birding, so it kind of ties him nicely with the podcast we did on Mexican Rensity, which was not this one. Can we post that picture? I don't know, I'll check and uh then he has His wife's team is called the Boobies, named after the blue footed booby, a common

bird that we have down here. Regardless, guys, thanks to both of you for helping to make being smart cool again. So please go check out www dot Alamos wild Lands dot org and sign up and sponsor someone for this bird of fon Super Bird Saturday. Get a team together, help these guys out. That's awesome. Tet Uh did you mention the s Bowl? Did you use the actual name? Because I think we can get in trouble for that for saying I don't think you should say it. Really yeah,

we'll find out. How can we get in trouble? Like apparently they actively sue people who use that word, like even mentioning it. Like remember the Simpsons, they never mentioned what they're where they were going when they went to that huge football game and Dolly Parton the episode that Dolly Parton is on. Now I have the halftime of my life. Yeah, all right, so we can just beat that out and people be like, smol, what's that right? Exactly? Okay, Well, if you have an NGO that you think we'd like

to plug, we're happy to do that from time to time. Um, you can tweet to us, especially if it's a bird ngo at s y s K podcast. Um, you can send us uh some sort of message on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash stuff you should know, and you can send us an email. Remember now to Stuff podcast at Discovery dot com. How do you? For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how Stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of

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