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> The National Smart Water Grid{trademark} will pay for itself in a single major flood event. That claim seemed... inflated to me. Digging into the report, the

> The National Smart Water Grid{trademark} will pay for itself in a single major flood event. That claim seemed... inflated to me. Digging into the report, the project is estimated to cost $82 billion (in 2009 dollars). That's... not a single major flood event. The worst flood in recent US history only managed ~$30 billion in ~2011 dollars, and many of the more pedestrian "major flood events" are managing to cost somewhere around $1-10 billion. (And that presumes it's not something like Hurricane Harvey, that would drench a metropolitan area downstream of any intakes to the west coast, so it wouldn't actually mitigate those events.)

gravypod 5y ago
> That's... not a single major flood event. The worst flood in recent US history only managed ~$30 billion in ~2011 dollars, and many of the more pedestrian "major flood events" are managing to cost somewhere around $1-10 billion. This is only half of the equation. There are large areas of the US with water shortages. If you could, hypothetically, completely remove the effects of the flooding you would "save" $30 billion in damages and then sell that water for profit to areas with droughts. For example, from 2010 to 2017 water bills for some families jumped 71% [0]. A quote from the same article: "Bills increased from $86.31 to $195.86 a month for a household of four using 150 gallons per person a day" So ~0.10 $/gallons. I'm not going to attempt to calculate the amount of water that recent floods have had but statements like "peak flow of 213,000 [ft^3/s]" are used I think we could see how it would be possible to make this math balance out. I'm not saying it does but the napink math leads me to believe that it could be possible if construction and maintenance was cheap enough. It would also improve economic prosperity in the regions (Vegas, etc). [0] - https://www.kqed.org/science/1920428/californians-are-struggling-to-pay-for-rising-water-rates https://www.kqed.org/science/1920428/californians-are-strugg... [1] - https://www.weather.gov/lix/ms_flood_history https://www.weather.gov/lix/ms_flood_history

gravypod 5y ago

> That's... not a single major flood event. The worst flood in recent US history only managed ~$30 billion in ~2011 dollars, and many of the more pedestrian "major flood events" are managing to cost somewhere around $1-10 billion. This is only half of the equation. There are large areas of the US with water shortages. If you could, hypothetically, completely remove the effects of the flooding you would "save" $30 billion in damages and then sell that water for profit to areas with droughts. For example, from 2010 to 2017 water bills for some families jumped 71% [0]. A quote from the same article: "Bills increased from $86.31 to $195.86 a month for a household of four using 150 gallons per person a day" So ~0.10 $/gallons. I'm not going to attempt to calculate the amount of water that recent floods have had but statements like "peak flow of 213,000 [ft^3/s]" are used I think we could see how it would be possible to make this math balance out. I'm not saying it does but the napink math leads me to believe that it could be possible if construction and maintenance was cheap enough. It would also improve economic prosperity in the regions (Vegas, etc). [0] - https://www.kqed.org/science/1920428/californians-are-struggling-to-pay-for-rising-water-rates https://www.kqed.org/science/1920428/californians-are-strugg... [1] - https://www.weather.gov/lix/ms_flood_history https://www.weather.gov/lix/ms_flood_history