Why do flood waters stick around? Why do places stay flooded after things like hurricanes, tsunamis, etc?
In: Other
Imagine a regular size sink with a regular size drain at the bottom of it. This represents a piece of land and its ability to drain water. When you fill the sink up from the tap, unless you have a really slow drain, water can drain about as fast as it fills.
Now imagine instead of a tap filling up a sink of water, you blast it with a fire hose, filling it with several hundreds of times the amount of water a sink would normally hold in a short amount of time. The sink can’t hold all that water, and it can’t drain it away very quickly. What happens here is the sink overflows and the water splashes to whatever is next to the sink.
But in land, what is next to the sink is… another sink, with another sink next to it, and another sink next to *that,* and so on. These sinks are all stacked up next to each other with no gaps for water to drain through – except, of course, the actual drains. And in floods, *all* of these sinks each have their own firehose’s worth of water. So the water can’t overflow to the side – there’s just *more water* there – and it can’t go down the drain very quickly. So it just kind of sits there, until the sinks can drain enough of it away, which takes time.
This is why floods give homeowners a sinking feeling.
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