Thursday, October 03, 2024

World's Dams Unprepared for Climate Change Conditions

Dams have been designed for river flows that will soon no longer apply, according to new research

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More from the 2011 article...

... In a paper published this month in the journal PLoS Biology, Matthews and his co-authors argue that investment and management decisions risk exacerbating climate-initiated changes, which could lead to economic catastrophes.

The conventional method of building dams is fundamentally flawed, said Matthews. Looking at the available data, engineers decide on a flow rate that they feel will optimize the infrastructure project. The problem, says Matthews, is that historical data is not a very good guide to the future of freshwater resources -- particularly now that extreme water conditions have been exacerbated by a rapidly changing climate. ...


#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2024-10-02 10:17 PM

Related...

American Dams Weren't Built for Today's Climate-Charged Rain and Floods
www.bnnbloomberg.ca

... As flooding hammered Appalachia in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, residents became intimately familiar with a new norm in the US's post-storm script: dams at imminent risk of failing.

Officials last week said multiple dams were on the brink, including Tennessee's Nolichucky Dam and North Carolina's Walters and Lake Lure dams. People in nearby communities were ordered to evacuate.

Ultimately, the dams held. But the close calls highlighted the stress on the nation's dams, many of which are more than half a century old and none of which were designed for the higher levels of precipitation brought on by climate change.

A lot of the dams "are absolutely performing a useful function for communities, whether helping to hold the water for irrigation or hydropower," said Tom Kiernan, president and chief executive officer of American Rivers, an environmental nonprofit. But many others, he said, "are outdated, unsafe, abandoned." ...


#2 | Posted by LampLighter at 2024-10-02 10:19 PM

Hey, that costs money. Billionaires need tax breaks.

#3 | Posted by LegallyYourDead at 2024-10-03 04:46 PM

Imagine how much further the green tech revolution would be if exxon and it's puppets hadn't spent decades calling manmade climate change a hoax.

They didn't want to spend to prevent it, now we all get to spend WAY MORE to pay for its destruction.

#4 | Posted by SpeakSoftly at 2024-10-03 04:52 PM

Perhaps the footage of the three gorgeous damn collapsing in China and the ensuing suffering will convince the last holdouts that climate change is real and we do need to do what we can to run on electricity including ironically enough hydroelectric.

#5 | Posted by Tor at 2024-10-03 05:42 PM

When 100 year floods start to come every
5-10 years, or 1-5 years, you know you are
on the wrong track to curb global warming.

#6 | Posted by earthmuse at 2024-10-04 02:12 PM

We need to lose the mindset of curbing it, and invest in sequestration tech and investing in infrastructure upgrades. Once we started the industrial revolution the genie was out of the bottle. We are not going to tax our way out of this or ever have enough windmills.

#7 | Posted by kwrx25 at 2024-10-04 07:30 PM

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