| Art Botterell |
Bridge Over
Flooding Waters
| Art Botterell tries to keep his head above water in California and on the Net. |
Sidebar:
California Flood Spots
on the World Wide Web
This article can be found on
page 58 of the Mar/Apr 1997
issue of 9-1-1 Magazine.
" It's show time."
The subject line of the e-mail went straight to the point. A senior hydrologist was warning colleagues in emergency management and public safety that the next wave of heavy, warm rain off the Pacific might be more than California's rivers could handle.
Things were still too uncertain for an official forecast, but this unofficial "word to the wise" gave his informal network of officials a head start on preparations for the mass evacuations and the heroic response and recovery effort triggered by the New Year's storm.
In San Francisco, the Mayor's Office of Emergency Services put finishing touches on a special web page for use if the storm struck hard in the City. The "Storm Watch" page would offer citizens a thumbnail-sized copy of the latest satellite photo, a situation summary from OES, a map of the city with current incidents plotted and tracked, and current weather warnings and forecasts automatically retrieved from National Weather Service web sites.
In Sacramento, the California Resources Agency and the Department of Water Resources augmented their online services with special flood-event Web pages so responders and the public alike could view the latest hydrologic data from the Agency's massive database. In Washington, D.C., FEMA's Office of Information and Media Affairs added online pages to help flood victims find response and recovery information. Similar efforts were underway in the rain-soaked states of Oregon and Washington.
Out on the California coast, nestled among redwood trees along the scenic Russian River, Lenni and Mitch were watching the river carefully, through their window and on their computer. On the screen they eyed hour-by-hour plots of the Russian's rise at three automated gauges upstream.
They'd been through this before. In 1986 their home had been left a muddy, foul-smelling mess by what was billed then as the "hundred-year flood." For various reasons the hundred-year flood returned just nine years later. After the 1995 flood the couple turned to FEMA and the U.S. Small Business Administration for "hazard mitigation" aid. Their two-story home now sat twelve feet higher atop a "flow-through" garage and sub-story Mitch (an engineer) had designed. The work was completed just in time for the river's return at the start of 1997.
As their neighbors evacuated (some of them, waiting too long, had to leave in canoes) Mitch and Lenni's elevated house became the neighborhood's unofficial command post. Lenni started an electronic journal, e-mailing installments to a network of friends around the world:
11:30 am PST
The river is, I'm guessing, at about 42 or 43 feet right now. Our house/yard has about 3 ft of muddy water swirling in and around it. The bottom step on Jan's front stairs is under water, too, and there's water knee deep in the her garage...
There's lots of debris floating around. Also, propane tanks that weren't tied down (summer homes?) have broken loose, and a pall of propane gas is drifting along at water level. The rain keeps coming down, heavy at times.
Mitigation worked... the river crested near 47 feet, leaving the original part of their home untouched.
The full story of the Internet in the 1997 winter floods will probably never be told. Dozens of agencies and thousands if not millions of individuals turned to the Internet during the floods. There's no way of knowing all the uses people made of online tools during the emergency.
Some of these uses of the Internet were carefully planned and designed. It may be, though, that the most important uses were the unplanned, informal ones that might never have occurred to us if the Net hadn't just been there when we needed it.
California Flood Spots
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