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> People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped
by lesuorac 2y ago
> People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams.
The floods are significantly worse because of the dams.
Water may naturally pool in areas but it doesn't pool to the degree necessary for hydropower which is why the dam is built. This causes 2 problems.
1) The construction of the dam will flood a ton of land upstream of the dam. If you've been to the beach you'll notice that the water doesn't need to go up or down very much for a ton of area to be flooded so in order to get that extra space.
2) You've now stored a ton of water upstream that will make any dam failure worse than a natural flood because you have all the rain from the rainstorm and the water stored before the rainstorm that's in the flood.
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However, I'm still pro-hydro because uh, electricity is nice and you can mitigate flood issues better than cancer.
- myrmidon 2y ago> The floods are significantly worse because of the dams. No they are not. Dams mitigate damage during floods because you have buffer capacity and control over outflow. Without dams, you get uncontrolled flooding every single time that there is a lot of rain. With dams, you only get uncontrolled flooding on dam failure, which tends to happen less often than... heavy rain. > The construction of the dam will flood a ton of land upstream of the dam. If you've been to the beach you'll notice that the water doesn't need to go up or down very much for a ton of area to be flooded so in order to get that extra space. Yes, large water reservoirs need large amounts of space. That is a completely different argument from flood risk, though, and those costs are negotiated on before the dam is even built.