This picture has gone viral recently, showing a house with an inflatable dam being completely protected from the Houston floods of 2016.
Given that such a simple solution seemingly exists, and given how much cheaper it is to deploy temporary inflatable dams than fixing water damage to a house, why wasn’t this ubiquitously deployed in the face of Harvey? Even if it only works X% of the time, that’s still many billions of dollars of damage prevented by such a simple invention.
So what, you’re supposed to fill it up yourself when you hear there might be a flood coming? I doubt the municipal water infrastructure could support half a million people each drawing a swimming pool’s worth of water all on the same day or two.
This really doesn’t look all that simple to do ubiquitously. It would have to be bought well in advance and stored safely, then deployed citywide on short notice (it won’t happen ubiquitously or safely if it’s left to random folks, it has to be planned in advance). And a 30 inch dam won’t be sufficient everywhere, so the costs will be exponentially more in some areas. And the water has to go somewhere, so the more areas you dam off, the higher the dams have to be to handle the increased volume behind the dam. And a catastrophic failure would be catastrophic in a way that a regular flood isn’t (as bad as these floods were, the water generally rose gradually).
Yup. Problem is, that the application is too narrow. Only works in a spot where the “flood” will be very low, AND the ground around the house is flat and level, AND the dam can be erected on very solid ground with zero potholes in it. One crevice under that thing, anywhere around it, and the water will come in under it.
A much better more cost effective way to deal with most floods, is genuine city planning that DOESN’T cave in to greedy speculator builders. Recognize that the term FLOOD PLAIN is a real thing, and don’t build there. Don’t allow everyone upstream, to build highways and parking lots that all drain back into the main river system.
Ultimately of course, there will be limits to any solution. A sudden event like this recent hurricane will overwhelm almost any viable anti-flood procedures.
They’re filled with the flood water, not municipal water. You need pumps, both to fill the dam and to account for seepage, so you’d better have a reliable source of electricity.
You funny.
So basically, you start building the dam after the flood has already started? That better be a fast pump. With a good filter.
As someone else noted, on top of everyone drawing all water at once. All the flood water has to go somewhere. That’s kind of a ‘fuck your neighbor’ scenario. Not that I/most people wouldn’t do it. But any water that doesn’t get into your house raises the flood level just a little bit. If everyone does it, it probably won’t matter. It’s the same thing for people that live in areas that have sanitary sewer backups when it rains. If you install a check valve in your main drain line going out to the sewers your house won’t flood, but everyone else will get more sewage in their basement. If everyone does it, there’s probably going to be enough hydraulic pressure to start breaching them.
Going back, if I’m near the top of the flood and put up a 3 foot high barrier it’ll keep the water out. If everyone does it, maybe someone ends up with with their house washed away instead of 2 feet in their basement.
Again, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it if you can, but just be aware that as more and more people do it, that water has to go somewhere.
You’ll probably also need to start filling it a few days ahead of time and I bet it’s a royal PITA to do it, especially if you’re by yourself and even worse or near impossible if your land isn’t level.
I remember a couple houses in Louisiana had that same protection during last year’s flooding.
Some farmers have access to a bobcat and can move dirt to create earthen dams to protect their houses.
It’s not practical to protect a big area.
Flood water? ISTM if you’re willing to wait for the water to get that close to the house, water that you know is going to wreck your house, you probably should have left.
It’s pretty much a exactly a case of closing the stable doors after the horses have bolted.
If this guy bought this thing online, then someone must be selling them. Which presumably means there have been a bunch of other people who have bought them. Where are all the other success stories? For that matter, that picture was from 2016. How did the same home with the same dam fare in 2017?
And if you want to make something like this practical, you don’t dam off every home in the city. You dam off the entire city. The cost of the dam is proportional to its length, but the area it protects is proportional to length squared, so bigger dams give you more bang for your buck. And Houston apparently floods often enough that you’d want to make the dam out of something more permanent, and while we’re at it taller.
Dams will raise the surrounding waters, but not by much. Only the area immediately surrounding the house needs to be dammed. Lawns, streets, fields, parking lots etc. can all remain undammed and absorb flood waters.
Given the estimated 100B+ worth of damage that Harvey has done, I can’t imagine widespread deployment of such inflatable dams could cost more than a billion or two.
Pumps are a scalable resource. If one pump isn’t fast enough, you just keep on adding pumps until it can handle the load. Given how cheap pumps are, even a hundred pumps running simultaneously is still going to be cheaper than tearing out drywall and dealing with mold.
They havebags that soak up flood water and expand at Home Depot. These are generally used for a door way, l use them for my walk out basement in case the creek rises. The creek has only passed my back gate once after it rained for four days straight. Another day and I would have had to use them.
Building earthen dams all around cities is fairly common in California … especially in the Delta region (Sacramento, Stockton) …
Except that you probably don’t have 100 outlets and you almost surely don’t have enough electricity to run 100 pumps at once.
But just as a thought experiment, I suppose it makes more sense to have multiple small ones than one large one, just for the sake of redundancy.
It also gives you the ability to spread the around (inside and outside) the property.
Don’t forget a hose for each one, a plume of water spraying 3 feet away doesn’t do much good.
Doesn’t look like they’re too widely used. Not only do they take water and electricity to fill but they’re also expensive.
Rather than equip each house with an inflatable dam, wouldn’t it make sense to have a larger one to protect a whole neighborhood? And if it makes sense for each neighborhood to have one, why not the whole city? And instead of inflatable temporary dams, why not have permanent ones already in place?
It turns out it does make sense to do this, which is why in lots of places they already have them.
Sure, these systems of levees and dikes sometimes fail, but if the permanent flood control systems fail, so would a three foot inflatable dam around your house.
A much better system if you want to protect your house would be to just build your house on three foot pilings. No electricity needed.
Inflatable dams should have a use in flood situations. They could be used as interim solutions while more extensive drainage systems are put in place. I don’t think they’ll create much of a holding area though, there has to be a route for the water to take out of the area and inflatable dams can help channel water that way. Too many of them used around particular locations such as protecting houses and building may make the problem worse by causing flooding in other areas and preventing efficient drainage. Use around critical structures makes sense. All in all, it is just another tool to use in dealing with a lack of planning that creates the problem in the first place.