Thursday, April 7, 2011

Unstupider

In case you were wondering, the water in the tunnel at the Glenwood bridge is too deep to ride without getting your feet wet, or at least one foot wet depending on how you rock it.

Fenders keep your butt dry in deepish water though - thanks for that.



You might also be interested to know it is moderately uncomfortable riding 8 miles in 30 degree temperatures with one wet foot.

And that stuff about wool keeping you warm even when its wet? Well that's crap.

Actually I'm not sure about the last one, both my feet were freak'n cold when I got to work. It took a few minutes in the shower before I could feel them, and when I could feel them it was bad.

I wonder if submerging your hubs in water is a bad thing?

Oh, and the water under the Broadway bridge? You can rock that feet dry - just go around the sign, closed doesn't mean you. Just watch out for the falling column.

Right, anyway you may have noticed that we are witnessing the annual demonstration of ‘oh shit’ water management here in river city.

Over several years of observation and questioning I have come to understand that the whole process (water management) goes something like this…

So in the winter dudes go out with fancy scientific sticks and sample the snow pack in various places to measure the water content. They come back to the office and do some fancy math to estimate how much water there is in different drainages.

Since they didn't measure all the snow in the whole area they put confidence intervals around they're estimate. It looks like this...



It means if they did the whole process 100 times that the estimate would come out between A and B 95 times. Most of the time it would be around C.

Right so if you were a smart guy you would guess there was C amount of water in the hills and adjust the water flow out of the reservoirs accordingly.

If you were a safety conscious conservative guy you would guess there was B amount of water in the hills and adjust the water flow out of the reservoirs accordingly - minimizing the chance of a flood.

Now if you were a farmer you would assume there is only A amount of water in the hills. You would keep every damn drop of water in the reservoirs until you were positive they would be full plus some. Then, if by chance there was really more water in the hills than A - you would go 'oh shit' and raise the water flowing out of reservoirs until homes along rivers were at risk. If you are lucky you squeak by without flooding homes, but if something unusual happens - like rain or record high temperatures at the wrong time - well, then someone gets wet. Usually someone in Eagle.

Guess what system they use here. Guess who pressures politicians to make sure they use that system. Guess who the politicians pressure.

It's all rather stupid.

Don't get me wrong. I am all for the annual douching of Garden City. I'm not all against flooding the homes of people who were stupid enough to build homes in a flood plain in Eagle either.

It's just that having a house along the river is stupider than it has to be. It could be relatively unstupider. And that is annoying.

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