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California Flood Risks Are 'Disaster Waiting to Happen' |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: While flooding in California's Central Valley is "the next big disaster waiting to happen," water-related infrastructure issues confront almost every community across the country, according to engineers at the University of Maryland's Clark School of Engineering in separate reports to California officials and in the journal Science. The panel's report, "A California Challenge: Flooding in the Central Valley," was commissioned by California's Department of Water Resources. The panel pointed out that many of the area's levees, constructed over the past 150 years to protect communities and property in the Central Valley, were poorly built or placed on inadequate foundations. The panel recommends that state and local officials take swift action to reduce the risk to people and the environment. "The challenges that California faces are widespread across the nation," Galloway said. Another civil engineering researcher from the Clark School, Dr. Lewis "Ed" Link, also served on the California panel. They are looking strategically at measures that can create long-term solutions, a model for others to follow." Galloway is also co-author of an article in the January 18, 2008 issue of Science -- "Aging Infrastructure and Ecosystem Restoration" -- which calls for the targeted decommissioning of deteriorated and obsolete infrastructure in order to support the restoration of degraded ecosystems. Link and Galloway were prominent figures in the review of the levee system around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina devastated the area. Galloway is a former brigadier general with the Army Corps of Engineers and has been part of the State of Louisiana review team looking at long-term plans for restoration of the Gulf Coast.
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