Episode 116: Transcript
Episode: 116: Water Disasters
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and the impending hydrological disaster that is our future. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction and you can preorder my upcoming novel The Terraformers, which is coming out in January.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:18] I’m Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer, I think quite a lot about science and you can preorder my upcoming novel, which is called Promises Stronger Than Darkness, which comes out in April.
Annalee: [00:00:31] We just wanted to take a second to say thanks to all the folks who voted to give us a Hugo Award for Best Fancast this year.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:39] Thank you so much. It really does mean so much to us. And we're just so grateful for your support over the past few years.
Annalee: [00:00:45] Yeah, I think this is a triple crown for us.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:46] It is.
Annalee: [00:00:48] This is our third Hugo Award for Best Fancast.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:52] We're so stoked!
Annalee: [00:00:52] And now back to the show.
[00:00:56] We live in California, where the land is suffering through the worst drought in over 1000 years. And as a result, we're dealing with massive annual wildfires and water shortages. People who are living in the driest parts of the state are having to dig deeper and deeper wells for potable water. And that’s siphoning off our already depleted aquifers. California's farms are facing a possible death sentence. And meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, massive floods from super storms are inundating cities and coastal areas.
[00:01:27] So, in this episode, we're talking about how science fiction has already started to grapple with the water crisis, sometimes by painting apocalyptic scenarios, and sometimes by suggesting hopeful solutions.
[00:01:40] And later in the episode, we'll be joined by research geologist Kyle House, who studies floods and rivers in Arizona, where the Lower Colorado River is his laboratory.
[00:01:51] Also, on our audio extra next week, we'll be talking about the complicated ethics of Amazon's move to pause reviews on the Rings of Power TV series, after getting review bombed by racists who didn't like seeing black elves and dwarves.
[00:02:08] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and funded by you, our listeners through Patreon? That's right. So, if you become a patron, you can give us a couple bucks, five or ten bucks would be really great. That's what makes this podcast happen. We give you audio extras with every episode if you become a patron. And plus, you get access to our Discord channel where we're hanging out right now. In fact, I keep posting weird pictures drawn by AIs of flying moose, and you can be seeing them and it would be great.
[00:02:42] So, anything you give really helps. It helps pay for our production. It helps pay for hosting. And it just helps pay for us to have really good opinions. So, thank you so much if you're already a supporter, and if you're not a supporter, please consider pitching in a little bit every month. So you can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:03:04] And now on to flowing into the show.
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Charlie Jane: [00:03:35] So obviously, science fiction has been dealing with water crises for a really long time. The novel A Princess of Mars, which came out in 1912, deals with a water crisis on Mars, because all the canals are drying up. The movie version, called simply, John Carter, was a bust. But the topic of water crises is still a common trope. Why is this such a sticky topic?
Annalee: [00:03:59] I mean, obviously, water is one of our most precious resources. And some of our oldest myths deal with things like mega floods, and also the horror of drought. So even outside of myths, some of our earliest written records from ancient Egypt, for example, chronicle that kingdom's annual rainfall, because they irrigated crops using the Nile’s annual floods.
[00:04:24] Sorry, I'm having a little archaeology moment here. But really, some of the earliest forms of evidence-based predictions of floods started in ancient Egypt where they used a device that was called the Nileometer. Okay, that is a translation but it is translated as Nileometer, and it measured just levels of the Nile. And officials used it to predict how well the harvest would go based on those water levels. So, humans have been obsessed with water management and water prediction and water use for a really long time. So it's obviously no surprise that it shows up in our fantasies and our science fiction, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:01] Sure. And it's interesting that you bring up Ancient Egypt because a lot of science fiction about water shortages and water-based disasters kind of depicts people kind of going back to an earlier or maybe pre industrial way of life.
Annalee: [00:05:14] Yes. When there's no water in a story, or like water has disappeared, or there's been some horrific disaster, suddenly, it seems like everything gets really medieval. Which is what allows me to bring up the most important movie in the water resource sub-genre, The Ice Pirates. This is a classic flick from 1984, which is a comedy about swashbuckling space pirates stealing water
Ice Pirate Clip: [00:05:44] In the far distant future. In a galaxy where those in the know don't go, real estate is cheap. And they've got great sushi. But there's no water.
You got any, uh, water?
It is a time when desperate men will swing from the chandeliers just to get a drink.
Just take a look at that.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:09] Yeah, I love that movie. It's just it's, you know, it's an important text in the canon of water based science fiction. And, you know, there's also like, recently, Mad Max: Fury Road, which feels very much like we've gone back to a medieval system. It's very feudal, under the rule of the Immortan Joe, where control of water is basically how he keeps his subjects in line.
Annalee: [00:06:32] Yeah, it's funny, because in that movie, our main character, Furiosa, is trying to fight against this, as you said, like a medieval kingdom run by a water despot. But also, the other thing that's interesting is in that kingdom, they worship industrial technology. They worship cars, basically. And they do that because implicitly cars and trucks are really rare in this movie. It's an era when fuel is also incredibly difficult to find. And it's like, somehow the loss of water imaginatively leads to a loss of 20th century technology. So, it seems like in these kinds of stories, water seems to stand in for other kinds of technology or other kinds of resources. Like, he who controls the water also controls things like high tech transit.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:26] Yeah, I think it's more just that like the Mad Max movies span different eras in like how we think about apocalypses. Like, there's nuclear war, which is kind of the early Mad Max films. But then also, oil scarcity, like Peak Oil is a big concern of like Mad Max: The Road Warrior, and I think also Beyond Thunderdome, which is a little hazier for me.
[00:07:46] I think that basically, when George Miller goes back to make a fourth Mad Max movie, Fury Road, he's like, well, so peak oil isn't such a big deal anymore, because we found new ways of getting oil out of the ground. But now water scarcity is the new thing. And so there's still that kind of lingering notion that resources in general, including oil, are going to be more scarce. But that also, the thing that’s really going to kill us is water, which I think is accurate.
[00:08:13] I think it's more accurate, actually, than the other Mad Max movies.
[00:08:15] And then you have Dune, where there are two resources that people are trying to get. This kind of ties in with what you were saying about Mad Max. In Dune, everybody's obsessed with getting the spice, which is this thing that allows you to travel through space. But also, water is like a huge concern, which is why people have to drink their own pee and sweat.
Annalee: [00:08:34] I mean, they do on the planet Arrakis, anyway—
Charlie Jane: [00:08:37]
Annalee: [00:08:37] Desert planet, where there's these two hidden resources on the planet, literally underground resources, which are water and the spice. And it's funny because water is sort of associated with transit here, just as you see in Mad Max: Fury Road where water is this resource and then transit is this resource. And they kind of both stand in for things that we really need in order to have a civilization.
[00:09:07] And in Dune, of course, the spice is what allows you to travel through space. But the funny thing is, in Dune, there's sort of this inverse relationship between water and spice, because if Arrakis actually gets rain again, which is kind of in the novels, that's the direction that the story is going is that the planet will eventually become green, it will start raining again, it won't be a desert planet anymore. But if it does go green, then that will kill the worms, presumably and that means that ends the spice trade. So having more water actually wrecks your ability to have this other resource.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:49] Yeah, and you know that I feel like Dune is a story that's more relevant than ever because of that kind concern about environmental exploitation and the excessive, or not excessive, but really intense focus on preserving your water. And the Fremen culture is all about, like, if you fight someone, you can take their water, which is like a whole, it's like, basically like control over water is part of how their civilization continues to exist. And the same time, it is kind of showing how our resource, extractive economy is kind of ultimately doomed and leads to pointless wars. So it's super relevant.
Annalee: [00:10:28] Yeah, I think the more that I ponder this, the more I feel like water is mean, obviously, in a lot of these stories, water is just water. It doesn't stand in for anything. It's like, literally, we need water to live. It's an important resource. But it also, it stands in for all of these other resources that we need to have to live the way we've become accustomed to, right? So that's why there's this fear of say, losing access to 20th century industrial technology, or interstellar transit. Because these are resources that allow us to live not literally, but they do figuratively and so water has a metaphorical meaning. But it also, like I said, it's literally just water.
[00:11:13] And it's funny because Dune is about resource exploitation, very literally. And then it's also about climate change. But the two things are super intermingled at this point in science fiction in a way that they just weren't during the era of something like A Princess of Mars, which wasn't focused on human caused climate change at all. It's just the reason why the water starts drying up is there’s kind of a hand wavy technical reason.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:42] Yeah. And of course, when you think about problems involving water, nowadays you're going to think about climate change, because that's what's causing the flooding and the droughts for the most part. I mean, it's like a major factor, at least. And you know, of course, we've seen the rise of a lot of science fiction and fantasy which deals with climate change. And often it does focus on our relationship with water, like recent novels, like Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. And Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, talk a lot about both sea level rise and water scarcity.
[00:12:12] But then there's also the amazing movie, Beasts of the Southern Wild, which deals with environmental racism in Louisiana. And that's kind of a near future fantasy story about a small town called The Bathtub, which is just outside the levees in Louisiana, and gets threatened with flooding. But there are some families that don't want to leave, even though the storm surges are incredibly dangerous.
BotSW Clip: [00:12:34] The water ain’t going down, man.
[00:12:39] That's my beautiful place under that water.
[00:12:41] Everything beautiful is gone.
[00:12:43] Gotta think about moving.
Annalee: [00:12:44] So that's from one of the really heartbreaking scenes in the film where the main character, Hushpuppy’s dad is just refusing to accept that climate change is destroying his home. But ultimately, there's this ray of hope at the end of that film that Hushpuppy and the new generation of people in the bathtub will figure out how to live in floating houses and just stay there.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:06] Yeah, it's basically like a both more grounded and more magical realist version of kind of the movie Waterworld.
Annalee: [00:13:13] Yes, which is of course, the classic, terrible yet great movie about climate change. Waterworld has this very Mad Max: Fury Road vibe. But it was also a huge box office failure just like John Carter. It's funny to me that these climate change adventure movies were such flops.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:37] Yeah, I feel like John Carter didn't really speak to climate change as much, at least in the film. It kind of left out more of that subplot about the canals drying up. But it is interesting that when you see a movie about climate change become a huge hit, it's usually something like The Day After Tomorrow, which is kind of structured like a classic disaster film.
Annalee: [00:13:55] Yeah. And that seems to lend itself better to telling the story than something about, say, resource exploitation or how do you allocate, you know, water or spice? Or what do you do in order to shore your town up against flooding? But I want to end this conversation on a slightly more hopeful note, by talking about science fiction that treats the ocean as a place of wonder, full of undiscovered creatures and maybe even new civilizations.
The Meg Clip: [00:14:26] What you people discovered is bigger than we ever thought possible.
[00:14:30] How big is that thing?
[00:14:33] It was the largest shark that ever existed.
[00:14:37] A living fossil.
[00:14:38] Thought had been extinct over 2 million years.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:45] Right, and that comes from The Meg which is actually a great movie about a team of scientists who discover an ancient megalodon inside one of the deep canyons at the bottom of the ocean. It’s a little bit Sharktopus and a little bit The Abyss.
Annalee: [00:15:00] Yes. Okay, so The Abyss is a perfect example of this hopeful way of looking at our relationship with water. So, if you don't remember, The Abyss was this incredibly game changing movie from the early 1990s. And partly it became famous because James Cameron, as usual, developed a whole bunch of new CGI software. And he used it to create these beautiful water creatures that our scientists discover. So, like in The Meg, they're going deep under the ocean, they're looking for just, stuff. And they find this kind of undersea civilization of very intelligent creatures that we never knew existed.
[00:15:39] And I feel like The Abyss and other stories like it, are trying to send the same message as something much more apocalyptic like The Beasts of the Southern Wild or even a Fury Road. They're saying that we need to respect the power of water. We need to stop polluting the ocean and squandering our water resources. But instead of saying that by threatening us with a loss of the oceans or with drought, The Abyss takes this really hopeful route, it promises us this glorious, wonderful place under the ocean that we haven't yet discovered.
[00:16:13] It's basically, I don't know how you feel about this, but I feel like it's the utopian inversion of Mad Max.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:19] Yeah, I mean, that sounds kind of right to me. I feel like, you know, it's important to show people something positive to reach towards, in addition to kind of being like, you're gonna lose it all and it's all gonna be terrible. Like, I think that sense of wonder can actually motivate people to care more about preserving our habitats.
Annalee: [00:16:38] Yeah. I also want to shout out to the novel A Door Into Ocean by the amazing writer and marine biologist, Joan Slonczewski. That's another example of exploring a beautiful undersea world. It's about a moon, where there's an undersea sciety of all women who've developed this really advanced biotech, and they have this really peaceful society.
[00:17:01] And of course, they're threatened by a bunch of aliens, aka humans who want to exploit their natural resources. And this is a novel that was really a critically acclaimed novel from the 1980s. So, I mean, maybe it even influenced the movie Avatar, I don't know. But I mean, it also participates in that whole trope in science fiction that deals with peaceful alien societies menaced by evil corporate dipshits. And putting the societies under water is just a way of tying back to the problems we have on Earth, where we're destroying these huge peaceful underwater ecosystems like coral reefs.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:37] Yeah. And of course, the next Avatar movie is going to be all set under the ocean, it's James Cameron going back to his love of undersea adventure. We often treat water like a natural resource, sort of like oil or shale. It's easy to forget that water is also habitat. There's a whole other world under the ocean on Earth, and we're slowly destroying it. So the water wars that are coming may threaten many more life forms than humans.
Annalee: [00:18:05] Yeah, so coming up after the break, we'll be talking to geologist and flood expert Kyle House who has devoted his entire career to thinking about water as both an ecosystem and a natural resource, and he recently came very close to floods in his backyard.
[00:18:23] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Charlie Jane: [00:18:29] We've got another podcast that we think you'll love. It's called Subtitle and it tells stories about languages and the people who speak them.
Annalee: [00:18:37] If you've ever wondered why some people are so good at learning languages, or thought about how different pronouns are represented in Swedish or Japanese, then Subtitle is the podcast for you.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:48] One episode profiles a woman who forgot her mother tongue and then set out to rediscover it. Another is about words that seem programmed to make us laugh.
Annalee: [00:18:59] Yeah, this is an amazing podcast if you're a language lover, so be sure to check out Subtitle with award winning journalists Patrick Cox and Kavita Pillay.
[00:19:09] Listen at Apple podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts.
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Annalee: [00:19:19] Welcome to the show, Kyle. Tell us where you are right now.
Kyle: [00:19:23] I'm up on the slope of the dead mountains outside of Bullhead City, Arizona.
Annalee: [00:19:29] And what can you see from where you're standing?
Kyle: [00:19:33] Actually, from here I can see the Colorado River which is the main reason I'm here. This is a big valley that the Lower Colorado River occupies. And I can see the burgeoning metropolis of Bullhead City, which is one of the hottest cities in North America. And still 80,000 or so people are willing to live there.
Annalee: [00:19:55] Wow, how hot is it out there now?
Kyle: [00:19:55] Today it's only about 98.
Annalee: [00:19:59] And can you tell was a little bit about what you're doing out there? What are you looking at? And what are you measuring and all that kind of stuff?
Kyle: [00:20:06] Yeah, well, I've been studying the Lower Colorado River for a long time because it has an incredible geologic archive of the inception and evolution of the river and its linkage to the Grand Canyon upstream over the last four and a half, five million years. This time, I've focused on the floodplain itself, which is a pretty marvelous place with respect to the dynamics of the Lower Colorado River prior to being dammed up. We have a new element of our project focus focused on developing geologic maps that depict what this river looked like. The river used to be an untamed, wild alluvial channel. And sometimes you have multiple channels, sometimes complete inundation of a floodplain that's about five to six miles wide in this particular valley, but up to 11 miles wide, farther south around Blythe, California. It was an absolutely marvelous thing to behold, then.
[00:21:01] Now it's forced into a single channel, has really limited flow variability, but it's a fundamentally important water resource for the Southwest. So it's managed, it used to be pretty much unmanageable. Floods prior to Hoover Dam on the Lower Colorado River would be from snow melt in the southern Rockies all the way up into Wyoming. And it can carve a channel about a mile wide in a flood and meander multiple miles in one event. We never would have been able to live with it, in a sense, if it wasn't managed. But we're really focused on trying to develop that portrayal of what it once looked like.
Annalee: [00:21:38] When you say it was marvelous. What do you mean by that? You mean just that it flowed where it wanted to?
Kyle: [00:21:44] It gave no effs, so to speak, it did whatever it needed to do. It would take out entire giant chunks of cottonwood forest in a single event. It would switch channels, it could cross a floodplain that's multiple miles wide. It’s a very, very different situation. And since these are big alluvial valleys downstream from the Grand Canyon, yeah, the river was basically able to go anywhere it wanted to go.
Annalee: [00:22:13] Yeah, so I can see why it needed to be tamed a little bit as people started settling in the area, since you don't really want the river to just decide to come through your backyard, for example,
Kyle: [00:22:24] In a very big way. Yeah. Hundreds of thousands of CFS, potentially. So
Annalee: [00:22:28] Wait, CFS?
Kyle: [00:22:30] Oh, sorry, cubic feet per second.
Annalee: [00:22:30] Yeah… holy crap. So, it's just barreling through?
Kyle: [00:22:34] Absolutely. And we have stratigraphic records of floods up in the Grand Canyon that link to floodplain deposits down in these valleys. So, we know that it's the same river, right? But when you start to develop these fundamental linkages between the geology in each of these reaches, you start to realize that this is a pretty amazing system. And we can get an idea of how large the floods were sort of prehistorically in a stable environment like the Grand Canyon. And then we can find correlative flood deposits down here and just develop a story about the behavior of the riveare before anybody really took any records of any kind, maybe over the last 3000, 5000 years, something like that.
Annalee: [00:23:19] And you just had a super personal experience with flooding actually in your backyard. Can you tell that story?
Kyle: [00:23:25] I'll start with the background. There's a big stratovolcano just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, it's about seven miles from my house. It's called San Francisco Mountain, it's a Pleistocene volcano. It's about 13,000 feet high. As our environment starts to change, we're seeing a lot more forest fires on that volcano. It has been a problem in Flagstaff that fires lead to floods. And that has been an issue that's known. But it came to the forefront back in 2010, when there was a really big fire on the east side of the mountain.
[00:23:56] But over early, no, it was late in the spring, someone started a fire by burning their toilet paper in a camping area on San Francisco Mountain and it burned our watershed and our watershed being the one that drains right into our general neighborhood. And it's only about a five square mile watershed, but it had pretty significant intensities of burn. So, you burn one of these watersheds and their their flood regime becomes a completely new, problematic thing.
Annalee: [00:24:26] Now why why is that? Because I don't know that I think for a lot of people, it doesn't make sense that a fire would cause a flood. So, what is the fire doing that's making that happen?
Kyle: [00:24:34] Well, in general, in this case, there was a lot of vegetation up there. And a forest that had been been there for centuries, and also had fires managed previously, so lots of pretty thick forest cover. And a forest is an incredibly important buffer to heavy rainfall on a volcano or any kind of steep slope because it intercepts the rain. It doesn't hit the ground all the time. It hits the tree and it works its way down trees. And also a forest seasonally will develop progressively larger forest floor cover of organic material, which is sort of sponge-like. And you burn all that stuff off. And all of a sudden these steep slopes, just, you've actually created water repellent surfaces, which is a function of what the fire does to the sedimentary material on the on the slopes.
Annalee: [00:25:29] So it's basically like the water is just going down a slide.
Kyle: [00:25:32] So, we have a monsoon season that starts started in late June this year. It usually starts around the Fourth of July, lasts through September. And it happened to be a really powerful monsoon this year, which is something that we… it’s one of the best parts of living in northern Arizona is to enjoy the monsoon season. But in this case, it just became an incredible problem because we got lots of rain on our little watershed and had multiple floods in my neighborhood. I passed five floods through my yard in less than a month.
Annalee: [00:26:04] Had that ever happened to you before? Have you ever had your neighborhood flood like that?
Kyle: [00:26:10] No. And I've only lived there for 12 years. But I some of my neighbors have lived there, essentially, since they started building it in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. And no one had seen that because, in all honesty, the watershed was a very different thing before the fire. It had this ability to really absorb a lot of water. The increase in the output of discharge from the watershed for a given input of rain increased by a factor of about 30, which is huge.
Annalee: [00:26:10] Wow. Yeah. So there's just all this water gushing down the slope that normally would have been absorbed.
Kyle: [00:26:45] Exactly.
Annalee: [00:26:46] And then, you were posting about this on Instagram. You were you were watching water gushing through before it hit your neighborhood several days ahead of time and you were putting sandbags up and you're getting your neighbors to put sandbags up. What was that like as someone who studies floods trying to plan for that in real time in your own home?
Kyle: [00:27:08] Yeah, it's like an infinite loop of irony that I got flooded because I've been studying floods in Arizona since about 1989. To quote Joni Mitchell. “I've looked at floods from both sides now.” But one thing I've left out of the story of the floods is that these floods are being transmitted to my property, and throughout the city of Flagstaff, it appears, by an entirely antiquated, substandard drainage system.
[00:27:33] So we have a culvert that can barely pass 50 cubic feet per second that's not very far from my house, and it's got a junction in an open box and it just hemorrhages out of this thing. Like a mud volcano with any discharges over 50 CFS coming into it. And we're looking at floods that may have been about 800 CFS.
Annalee: [00:27:54] Oh, crap.
Kyle: [00:27:54] So we were basically victims of circumstance with respect to a stormwater management system that was known to be flawed for at least 16 years based on discussions in Planning and Zoning Commission meetings, that we found the minutes for and we just had to pay the price. And it really sucked, honestly.
[00:28:19] One of the things that really saved us was some consultants were called in to kind of evaluate the problem. And some of them set up a drainage like a rain gauge network and measured the output of some of the floods from previous fires and had a really good idea of the fact that this was probably going to happen since we had that fire in June. And they and the city promulgated high resolution flood depth maps to the neighborhood and let people know if they were facing a crisis or not.
[00:28:48] And that was probably two weeks before the first flood maybe three weeks, I sort of lost track. The whole summer’s just sort of melted. So there was this level of preparation that was really useful. And I'm familiar with hydraulic modeling of floods and how floods work, and it was pretty obvious that we were gonna get hit. And so, I on the Fourth of July we have a neighborhood kind of barbecue get together. We're on a cul de sac, and we had a discussion. I sort of gave a presentation about here's my take on the flood situation, I think we are in jeopardy. We started to fortify stuff and I built this huge berm with the help of some friends and of course my wife in our backyard that allowed us to convey flow out of an area where it was ponding where an apartment complex is. I just took some fence panels down and let all this discharge goes through. But we built this pretty fantastic berm that is like 15 sandbags per foot and it's about 40 feet long. So you can imagine how much of a pain in the ass that was.
Annalee: [00:29:47] So there's a bunch of flow that's coming in. It's puddling up around this apartment building. So what you want to do is not have it puddle up. You want to have it flow through the neighborhood and get the heck out wherever it's going to go. Were you creating a canal?
Kyle: [00:30:01] They became canals because I had so much erosion on my landscape. But it's essentially a wall of sandbags shaped like a pyramid. And it kind of wraps like a rainbow around my house.
Annalee: [00:30:13] Did it work?
Kyle: [00:30:15] It saved my house and part of my back porch from inundation by building this big thing and diverting it around both sides of my home. And I had neighbors that had to do similar things. It was just a real lesson and impromptu engineering, and it did work. We passed five floods through the yard without any getting in our house, some of my neighbors, unfortunately, did get flooded, nothing catastrophic. But the minute flood water is into your house, your life sort of changes a bit, you really got to deal with stuff immediately.
Annalee: [00:30:42] Did you know you were gonna have to sacrifice your backyard?
Kyle: [00:30:47] No, I mean, the way I built it meant that I knew that there was a potential, but I really had no idea that there was going to happen as severely as it did and as frequently, because that's an absolutely anomalous frequency. But when you learn that the culvert that creates that problem, in three out of the five floods is so drastically, undersized. Then you realize, oh, no, now I get it. There wasn't a system in place that was even remotely able to handle a flood that was half the size of some of the floods that we had. So it's a story about wildfire, and drainage basins, equals bigger floods, and more frequent floods. It just alters the hydrology of the system so much what you might know historically about floods prior to the fire is only just a curiosity, because the entire flood regime is transformed by the fire.
Annalee: [00:31:38] Man. So what would you want to do differently going forward?
Kyle: [00:31:46] Well, Flagstaff is essentially a poster child for this wildfire equals flood problem. But the point is that Flagstaff and places like Flagstaff are going to face this problem for the foreseeable future. They came out in advance and did tell us that, hey, we're pretty sure that we're going to have this problem, and you need to do something about it. That was the city and the engineers coming by. But that just needs to take place on a different timeframe, because we have a big mountain with 360 degree watersheds on it all the way around it. And they're all going to feel this sort of impact. And what you need to do is to not just hope that there won't be a fire. Is to plan for it and realize that, my God, well, if this watershed that hasn't yet burned, burns, then we're in serious trouble, because that's going to be like there's an area that's the headwaters of the Rio de Flag, the drainage that flows through Flagstaff, which is an ephemeral drainage, and only really flows in response to heavy snowpack or really heavy rain. But it’ll impact the entire downtown area, if it gets a flood amped up, like what we had. So the idea is to know that's a problem, model, a scenario of severe burn in the watershed and figure out what engineering maneuvers you can make before the flood, there was adequate time to actually make them. But not—
Annalee: [00:33:03] Yeah, so is it like sandbagging? Like, should we be just thinking about like, okay, every year, we should be figuring out how sandbag, or do we want to rebuild our cities? Or what do we need to do?
Kyle: [00:33:13] Yeah, well. No, there’s a story about a place called Soldier’s Creek, Wisconsin, I believe, usually gets thrown around where they moved their entire city because of just constant seasonal flooding, something like that. That’s a pretty extreme measure. And sometimes, if the situation is so perilous in certain places, then a city definitely has to consider that, like, we're gonna have to buy these properties. The best approach is sort of an all hazards assessment with wildfire and flooding at the top of the list, and recognize which sites are the most vulnerable? And every site is vulnerable, but like, what's the magnitude of vulnerability now we have pretty good rainfall records in San Francisco Mountain. We have a lot of different experiences with floods from these burns, it's pretty clear what happens and how bad it can be. And so the ideal would be for the city, the county, the state, potentially the country, provides the funding necessary to prepare for those structurally.
Annalee: [00:34:14] Right. And so that means like rebuilding our water infrastructure, right? Like rebuilding our permanent runoff infrastructure.
Kyle: [00:34:14] Absolutely. Yeah, in our little town, which is a town of like 80,000, to about the size of Bullhead, but a lot cooler. That's the only solution. But that doesn't mean that that's the action that's going to be taken because of the amount of money involved and people get all uptight when you tell them that I think you really have to resize this thing. This stream in a normal summer can no longer fit under the highway to the Grand Canyon. We have two highways that go to the Grand Canyon and Flagstaff one goes straight north, one goes out to the east, 180 and 89. And they're obviously incredibly important highways. They both closed multiple times this summer because of flooding on the highway?
Annalee: [00:35:02] Yeah. So what are you going to do next year? Are you just going to stock up on sandbags?
Kyle: [00:35:08] Well, we don't have to stock up because we already have like 2500 of them, but…
Annalee: [00:35:10] Are you gonna leave them out there, like are you gonna take them down and put them back up, like what's gonna happen?
Kyle: [00:35:18] I need to be able to manage it in a rational way, in a structural way, just in my own property. And when we started that process, it's super expensive to even think about it. But obviously, passing five floods through my yard certainly told us exactly what the water wants to do when it finds our fence. So we actually have built a cinderblock wall, which will be completed on Friday. But I will note that I took parts of my fence down to pass the flood.
Annalee: [00:35:48] Yeah.
Kyle: [00:35:50] Under no requirement to do that. I was not required to do that but it just was the right thing to do. And I saved some of my neighbors, and certainly the apartment complex right behind my house from significant damage. And so we've got this wall built, and we've put a gate on it, to where we can play this role again, if we had to, but we in no way want to have to do that.
Annalee: [00:36:13] What's it like trying to clean up after a flood like that comes through your neighborhood.
Kyle: [00:36:17] It comes out of the mountain pretty, you know, it's full of debris and charcoal and all kinds of crap. So, the process of a post wildfire flood is also like cleaning the watershed of all the debris that's now on the ground. You impose this much larger amount of runoff in the main creek channel, and it's going to overflow that channel and pick up all this litter that's been on the ground for decades.
Annalee: [00:36:40] This is a multi-stage process. It's not just about guiding the water. It's about cleaning the watershed. It's about cleaning the water itself as it flows through. It's not something even your neighborhood can, I mean, obviously your neighborhood should not be responsible for this, but it's obviously an incredibly—
Kyle: [00:36:56] Well, we definitely were. It was completely on us to solve the problem for this summer. Some funding was granted to the city to develop a detention basin upstream of all the neighborhoods that can accommodate quite a lot of water. Since we have this one problem with this hilariously undersized culvert, we'll still get flooded.
Annalee: [00:37:19] Here in California, we've been warned, you know that we're gonna have mega floods soon as well. I mean, the state did flood horribly in the 19th century, Sacramento was underwater.
Kyle: [00:37:29] 1861-62, giant.
Annalee: [00:37:30] The great flood and it's an incredible threat coming toward us again. So, what are the impending water emergencies that are keeping you up at night?
Kyle: [00:37:40] I can only really speak from my perspective in the southwest. We have so many different shades of water emergency down here, right now. The reservoirs on the Colorado River are as low as they've ever been since they were built. Which is an incredible warning sign that there's something wrong with the way we're trying to manage water.
Annalee: [00:38:03] Will the Colorado River ever dry up? Is that something that could happen?
Kyle: [00:38:07] That would be like an absolutely worst case, kind of remarkable scenario, but flowing a lot less delivering a lot less water, is what we're experiencing right now. Running dry is it's kind of like the big question is how do you stop a river? We find evidence for all kinds of rivers in the geologic record. And they came and they went, and it's like, well, what does it take for the went part? That's usually a really long term tectonic process, right? But no, I wouldn't want to make a claim that the Colorado River will one day go dry. But that depends on if you're a deep time geologist or not, because of course it will at some point.
Annalee: [00:38:44] Right. But that's not—
Kyle: [00:38:46] But it won’t be the Colorado River anymore.
Annalee: [00:38:48] Right. So we're not worried that it's going to go dry. We're just worried that it's not going to be able to provide the water than it once did and there's already evidence that it can't.
Kyle: [00:38:57] Absolutely, that's where we are right now. The reservoir, the loss that we've had there. It’s multi-dimensional, to say the least, but it has one really important story. And that is there is not enough water to be what we were in the 1940s and ‘50s. You know, it's just a very different situation.
Annalee: [00:39:17] So we have to prepare for less water, but also more water at the same time.
Kyle: [00:39:24] Yeah, that's the vagary of extreme event hydrology for sure. But in terms of flood hazards increasing over time, that's that's a pretty standard thing as communities grow, honestly. Just that population growth issue will create a larger flood hazard issue because there's not enough attention given to the problem before development takes place. And there's not enough money focused on retrofitting things that people that are responsible for doing it know are inadequate.
Annalee: [00:39:56] So maybe we need to start thinking about both retrofitting settlements so that there's places for water to flow through. But also, as we build new settlements and new communities, thinking about like, well, where are we going to send the water if our watershed burns, or even if it doesn't burn, even if we just get an anomalously large storm surge or flood?
Kyle: [00:40:17] Right. it's truly a much more holistic way to think about it. And some people think that that’s some egg-headed concept, but they really do have to understand how the system works, and how it responds on different timescales.
[00:40:32] And I don't mean millions of years, I mean, like decadal, to centennial, to maybe millennial timescales, to know what you're up against. And accommodate the high end of that, based on real information about what you can say. There are ways. As a geologist, my specialty was paleo flood hydrology when I was a grad student at U of A. And our whole goal was to go find stratigraphic records of floods in bedrock canyons to assess what flood frequency probabilities really might mean in certain areas.
[00:41:00] Because in the West, there's very short records, there's not a lot of information to really say, here’s the X percent chance flood, that kind of thing. You really need to do more comprehensive studies on the systems that you're worried about. And we could figure out roughly what the frequency of fires has been over the last several thousands of years. Instead of waiting for the fire to force you to do that analysis, do the analysis for every watershed in your municipal area. Don't wait for the problem to create a nightmare like it did for me and my neighbors.
Annalee: [00:41:31] Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me while you're out there doing your research on the river.
Kyle: [00:41:38] Of course.
[00:41:39] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:41:42] Thank you so much for listening to yet another episode of Our Opinions Are Correct.. Remember that you can find us on patreon patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And we'd really appreciate it if you would pitch in and help out. You can also find us on Twitter at @OOACpod. And it really helps also if you rate and review us on Apple podcasts. It helps people find the pod. Thank you so much to our intrepid producer Veronica Simonetti. And thanks to Chris Palmer for the music. Talk to you later. And if you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord.
Together: [00:42:15] Bye!