
24.5 Trillion Gallons of Water - jostmey
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/30/harvey-has-unloaded-24-5-trillion-gallons-of-water-on-texas-and-louisiana/?tid=a_inl
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secabeen
My favorite statistic is that 24.5 trillion gallons of water is 75 million
acre-feet, or slightly more water than all California agriculture uses in 2
years.

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martinald
Acre-feet? Is this a satirical unit of measurement?!

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tbabb
1 acre covered in 1 foot of water. Makes sense where farmland is measured in
acres, and actually probably a bit easier to visualize than "10^6L"\-- though
I know what you mean.

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nbanks
Hmm... so 10^6L would be 0.1 hectare meters. Acre feet may be easy to
visualize, but it's hard to convert.

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melling
There's been a bit of discussion about how Houston is prone to flooding to
begin with because there's no zoning, etc.

This Guardian article was written 2 months ago:

“Where the built environment is a main force exacerbating the impacts of urban
flooding, Houston is number one and it’s not even close.”

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/16/texas-
fl...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/16/texas-flooding-
houston-climate-change-disaster)

A more recent Atlantic article:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/why-c...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/why-
cities-flood/538251/)

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jhayward
These are rather viewpoint-based articles. As a thought experiment, test their
cause-and-effect explanations against the historical floods that Houston has
experienced since it was originated by the Allen brothers. Houston had
terrible floods even in the 1920's and 30's. There was very little concrete
and pavement in those days, especially in the areas they claim are lost
prairie.

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melling
Saying there were bad floods before and there are bad floods now doesn’t
negate the claim that humans have made the problem worse.

[http://www.npr.org/2017/08/27/546603361/houstons-
explosive-g...](http://www.npr.org/2017/08/27/546603361/houstons-explosive-
growth-amid-disregard-of-flood-preparedness)

~~~
jhayward
Nothing in that article demonstrates that the flooding was made any worse by
any of the claimed mal-administration. The only demonstrable difference these
days is that very heavy rainfall events are more frequent, and more severe.
Which does not support the hypothesis.

Edited to add: I will grant that there is more damage, because there are more
structures now. Also that many of the structures built in the last decade or
so a infill in flood-prone areas. So that's a good candidate for mal-
administration. But the theory that the actual floods are worse, in terms of
area flooded, flood depth, etc., is not supported IMO without better science.
Could be true. But what we know for sure is it's raining more.

~~~
melling
Hey, have you followed up with this story? Turns out could be true, is true.

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elevensies
There are ~500 cities with population over one million, so I think we are
going to be seeing a 500-year disaster hit a million-plus city about once a
year.

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pizza
Sampling a timeseries is not like sampling an ensemble. But nonetheless I
agree we will probably see many more large-scale climate events than we have.

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marzell
This includes a visualization of a "cube" that doesn't have parallel planes.
I'm not sure how much I can trust that lol

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flexie
That' almost 100 trillon litres. In a few hours it is.

So 1 with 14 zeros after. A cubic meter is 1,000 litres. So we are talking 100
billion cubic meters. Or the same as 100 cubic km.

Or the same amount of water as in a deep square lake which is 10 times 10 km
wide and 1 km deep.

Or a square lake which is almost 32 km on each side and 100 meters deep.

Or a shallow square lake which is 1 meter deep and roughly 317 km on each
side.

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samstave
I prefer all my lakes to be hexagonal or octagonal - please edit your comment.

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sapienthomo
As they say: Is that a lot? I hate the way headlines measure things in useless
units, just to get a bigger exponent. Why didn't they say it was 19000
trillion teaspoons? That's just as easy -- i.e. impossible -- to visualize. I
think a possibly easier-to-visualize description is enough water to cover the
whole state of Texas six inches deep.

~~~
Johnny555
The diagram of the huge cube of water hovering over the city wasn't enough to
help you visualize that it's a huge amount of water?

They included several other visualization descriptions in the article. They
can't put it all in the headline.

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pc2g4d
24.5 trillion gallons of water is a huge problem... and also a huge resource.
It's just in the wrong place, right? What if we had a system for rerouting
water dumps like this around the country and could send it to a drought
region?

We have interstate highways. How about interstate drainage?

Well, I guess that's what rivers are....

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dreamcompiler
Another nice visualization: [https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2017/8/28/16217626/ha...](https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2017/8/28/16217626/harvey-houston-flood-water-visualized)

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nashashmi
That's it! We need a new unit of volume to replace gallons. A gallon is way
too small. A barrel is difficult to understand. If only we had something
standard like swimming pool or something...

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ncr100
24 climate-change units of water?

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Fjolsvith
Melted Icebergs of water.

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peterwwillis
So basically, we need a pipeline from Houston to California.

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sapienthomo
California has only 20 million acre feet of reservoir capacity, which is
currently filled to 125% of typical levels. The last thing that state needs is
another 75 million acre feet of water.

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dragonwriter
California has very roughly a _billion_ acre-feet of _groundwater_
capacity[0], and it is so severely depleted from being pumped out to cope with
surface-water shortfalls over the years that the Central Valley is sinking
(and eroding groundwater capacity in the process.)

California doesn't need 75 million more acre-feet of _surface_ water, but it
could probably benefit from multiples of that being pumped back into the
ground.

[0] CA Dept of Water Resources estimates between 850 million and 1.3 billion,
[http://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/groundwater/recharge/](http://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/groundwater/recharge/)

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nashashmi
NYC has reservoirs close to 500 billion gallons of water combined. And the
water level only goes down to 80% during the summer.

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racx
If my math is correct, that would be 2.6 hours of foz de iguaçu falls.

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the_d00d
Fyi...there are no basements in Houston (or Texas really) despite what the
article states about how water will have to be pumped out of all the
basements.

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jayess
Can't view the page. It blocks me because of ad blocker.

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msla
It works for me with Firefox and uBlock Origin.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-
origin...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)

~~~
overcast
uBlock doesn't work with Nightly yet :(

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medlazik
RC works fine so far

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-
origin...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-
origin/versions/beta)

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overcast
awesome, thank you! Have you tried uBlock + ghostery together, necessary?
conflicts?

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ianai
The take away is that there aren't likely to be technological remedies to the
affects of climate change. Once the earths defense systems are triggered we
simply die.

~~~
Johnny555
How is that a takeaway? The article didn't even mention climate change (and
it's impossible to definitively attribute a single event to climate change.

How is a big wet storm a "defense mechanism"? Why would the earth even have
active "defense" mechanisms? What it is it defending?

It doesn't seem like a very effective defense mechanism, so far reports are
that there were only 20 - 30 confirmed deaths due to the floods out of 6
million in the metro area. While tragic in the real sense, more people than
that must die of natural causes in the Houston area every day.

