Nature Gets a Vote

Military strategists -- the good ones anyway -- know a big truth; your enemy gets a vote. There are forces at work in the world that do not do our bidding, that do not know our plans, and care less about them. It is a good life lesson, and I was thinking about that as I watched floodwaters devour much of Colorado's front range last month.

For most of my life I have generally trusted that technological and engineering solutions could solve most of our problems with high levels of safety. While I still think those solutions deserve our consideration, recent events such as the Colorado floods and the Fukushima Daichi reactor disaster from two years ago, have shaken my confidence.

You'll recall that the Fukushima disaster happened when a massive tsunami inundated the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The plant was designed with layered defense principles in place. It was designed to "fail to safe" in the event of a severe earthquake. 

What does it mean to "fail to safe?" Have you ever wondered why elevators don't fall? Because they are designed  so that if they lose power -- which would cause them to fall -- that a braking mechanism will engage and stop the elevator in the shaft. The braking mechanism is disengaged by the same power source that moves the elevator, when that power fails, the break engages. 

That is an example of engineering solutions making things safer for us (nothing is completely safe, but most things can be made safer).

Fukushima was engineered to be safe against almost every imaginable event; earthquakes, airplanes, operator screw-ups -- almost everything but a 30 foot wall of sea-water. They missed that one.

Along Colorado's front range, floods have followed a consistent pattern. A violent thunderstorm in a limited area sends a large amount of water into a river or creek causing highly destructive, albeit fairly limited, flash floods. Meteorologists weren't quite sure what to make of a massive weather system that appeared to be have the capacity to inundate much of northern Colorado. It defied all their expectations. Flood control measures and systems were defeated. 

In addition to the property damage , people driven from their homes, washed out roads, cut-off mountain towns and a mercifully small number of lost lives, the storm also did severe damage to oil and gas drilling and storage sites across the plains of north-eastern Colorado. Storage ponds containing "fracking" effluent were flushed out and the effluent washed into the soil where it will percolate into aquifers that supply water to farms and communities. Oil storage tanks were upset by walls of water moving through ancient seasonal waterways, as well as newer expedient one like highways. Those tanks were filmed rolling and bobbing like so many corks across the prairies, jettisoning their contents into the water tables. 

The front-range floods were bad enough, but imagine a little more rain and a somewhat larger area, spreading from Denver to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Imagine massive walls of water hitting the North and South Platte Rivers and moving across the prairies with the inexorable intensity and appetites that we saw in the Saint Vrain and Big Thompson Rivers and Boulder Creek. 

Imagine the Keystone XL Pipeline in the rivers' path. 

Nature gets a vote too.