Sensor Grid Predicts Imminent Flooding

An anonymous reader writes, "NewScientistTech has an interesting story about a river sensor network that not only measures water depth and flow, but also forms a wireless computing grid to calculate possible flooding scenarios." From the article: "If the river's behavior starts to change, the network uses the data collected to run models and predict what will happen next. If a flood seems likely — because it is rapidly rising and moving quickly — the network can send a wireless warning containing the details... [A researcher said:] 'One end goal would be that people living in areas that flood can install these themselves. They are simple and robust enough to make that possible.'"

The yearly handouts must end

[Y-Crate]

Unfortunately, this will not affect the real problem, which is people continually rebuilding on extremely flood-prone land at taxpayer and insurance customer expense.

There is a difference between: "I'm building my house here, and there is a remote chance of a flood. Would you agree to help me out and spread out the risk?" and "Between me, my father and my grandfather we've rebuilt this house 4 times due to flooding. It's terrible. Give us more money to do it again."

I'm often accused of being a liberal, but the latter group deserve nothing from the government, and insurance companies should not be compelled to grant them policies. There has to be a "Sorry, but that just doesn't make any sense" threshold when it comes to these sorts of things. National Flood Insurance and private initiatives are a good safety net that I fully support, but they shouldn't be a replacement for common sense and responsibility.

Re:The yearly handouts must end

[CheeseTroll]

Please show me an insurance company that would insure such a flood-prone property, or is compelled to do so.

Re:The yearly handouts must end

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have missed the ".gov" at the end of that address or the giant FEMA logo at the top of the page. Sure the government provides flood insurance to flood-prone areas. That's the problem. The government runs that program at a loss and funds it with taxpayer money. There's a reason that no private businesses offer flood insurance to flood-prone areas; it's a huge waste of money.

The USG: Your source for "Stupid Insurance"

[Kadin2048]

/me points in the direction of Capitol Hill.

Why our government, of course; the world's biggest insurance company, and the only one dumb enough to underwrite such a policy.

No sane insurance company would write half the policies that the National Flood Insurance Program does, because they know better. They can't just depend on a steady stream of money from nowhere to keep them afloat financially, at the same time that their insureds may be literally; companies in the real world have to at least break even over the long term.

Basically, the NFIP is a giant subsidy, paid by people living in non-flood-prone areas in order to allow other people to live in areas where they really shouldn't be. The clincher is that although defenders of the program always love to wave around the spectre of some poor family being ruined by flooding, most of those people don't know about and don't get the program in the first place. It's mostly people who have money -- and probably could afford to buy private flood insurance on the open market, if it existed (or who would just live somewhere else) -- who have policies and benefit from the program. So not only is it a stupid subsidy, it's a regressive tax on top of it.

Floods in Czech Republic

[slidersv]

I live in Czech Republic, where couple of years ago the country experienced the worst floods ever, and even the capital city was flooded.

We knew about the flood, we knew about it's magnitude. There was just nothing we could do about it. Dam management worked their butts off, but dams could not hold the water and it poured OVER the dams.

It's not like you're can build 50ft wall around the river in the heart of the capital city, just so once in your lifetime it would be used. Shoure it would be the solution, but the cost and inconvinience would be worse than cleaning up the mess

And then you have the subway, which was flooded too. There are doors that are supposed to hold the water and not let it spread to all the tunnels, but they just didn't. I'm not sure who's fault was that, but i imagine it would be pretty hard to leak-proof the wall, that is supposed to automatically close inside the subway, while you have no water to test it with.
An then there were villages that sunk completely. Their only solution would be to build a wall around a village.

Rivers spread far and wide, transforming into huge lakes that are omnipresent.