I don’t get how houses/buildings can go under water?
In: 8
Floods happen when drainage systems and rivers can’t handle the amount of water trying to drain away. The problem is even worse when you live in a flat region like the Gulf Coast. There just isn’t anywhere lower for the water to go.
Hurricanes dump huge amounts of water. When a hurricane approaches land it is pushing a massive amount of water in front of it called storm surge. This water flows over land and immediately fills up the rivers. Sometimes it is so much water that the river will flow backwards. Then as the hurricane makes landfall all the rain it brings with it has nowhere to go. Take Hurricane Harvey as an example. Harvey stalled out over Houston and dump an entire years worth of rain in 3 days. No system of drainage is built to handle that much water. And as the hurricane moves on it dumps even more rain further up river which still can’t drain away because the river are still full.
I recommend a YouTube channel called Pratical Engineering. He has several videos explaining how drainage systems and water handling works and what ways they can fail. And he explains everything in a way that’s easy to understand and he builds nice models to demonstrate. Here a playlist of flood control systems. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTZM4MrZKfW-_GFGXeWYgQ5zfC29Om1Np
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