Rivers

I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water…has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river.

– Roderick Haig-Brown

In my normal, day-to-day engineering life, I design really exciting things like shopping centers, apartment complexes, and acre upon acre of parking lots.  But, somewhere buried under all the sewer lines and concrete lives a river engineer.  The river engineer in me gets really excited about things like flooding, erosion, and happy little streams.  The river engineering in me had a great week this week!

I spent last Friday morning on a field trip with one of the senior engineers in our office.  He is a San Antonio native who is passionate about natural channel design and stream restoration.  He took me to sites all over San Antonio to show me how the river system interacts with the city.  It was a fascinating field trip from start to finish.  Through pure luck, it rained over 10 inches in the 24 hours that followed our field trip.  A storm of this magnitude is what is known as the 1% flood event (or the 100-year storm - a total misnomer for reasons I won't go into because they involve statistics and most of you have probably already tuned out).  So, like any good river engineer, I spent Saturday morning running around town taking pictures of all the places I'd seen the day before.  Enjoy a few before and after shots.

This next one is my favorite.  The blue line of the right shows how high the water rose.  The little stick person is about where I was standing when I took the before picture.  At the peak of the flood, I would have been completely under water!  This is also my favorite picture because all sorts of interesting things are going on with the flooded river - things that only happen when lots and lots of water moves really quickly.