JAWRA Blog

A week ago yesterday, JAWRA World Editorial Headquarters, high above downtown Reston, was a viewpoint for watching the last transport flight of the space shuttle, Discovery. I joined some friends (w/champagne!) on a rooftop down the street to witness the fly-overs and landing Dulles Airport.

With the retirement of the shuttles, Americans going to the International Space Station have to hitch a ride with the Russians. Its final fly-over passed near the grave of John F. Kennedy. What would JFK have thought?

What’s to become of American science? The race to the moon, and the shuttle program which followed it, cost a king’s ransom. But we were willing to pay the price, any price, to establish U.S. primacy in science and engineering. And, not only in space: our Clean Water Act of 1972 set the world standard for cleaning up polluted streams, with the Federal Government paying up to 75 percent of construction costs. Many of my generation got our educations and our first jobs thanks to such grand endeavors. And now? Put simply, there is no way our current politicians are going to initiate any program more than a shadow of our past glory.

But we will persevere, working on limited budgets and learning to draw upon the talent of our colleagues around the world. The science is too important to neglect, to let lie stagnant. Someday, we will need it again, to deal with a changing world and to clean up our mistakes.

One hundred years ago, late in the evening of April 14th, lookouts on the RMS Titanic were scanning the sea ahead. Had the lookouts been asleep, the ship might have crashed head-on into the iceberg … and survived. Alerted, she turned enough to tear open her side. It is the accident you don’t think of that gets you.

Robust design, often mentioned in JAWRA articles, is not just an abstract concept. Engineers are taught, from their first days in engineering school, to built in a “safety factor.” It’s not because we can’t calculate pressures or stress, or the amount of runoff from a given rain event. It’s because there are just so many things we can’t anticipate in dealing with people and nature. Our recent Featured Collection on Nonstationarity brought some of the issues to light.

With budgets tight, we face a constant battle to whittle away at margins of safety and reliability to save a few bucks. The short term is not always the best term. It’s what you don’t think of that gets you.

Here’s a graph sent to me by Steve Bourne. He did an analysis of the abstracts and papers at the recent AWRA Specialty Conference on GIS and Water Resources VII.

Note, even though the conference was in New Orleans, the words, “food,” “oysters,” etc. did NOT appear. Such dedication!

Colonel Robert Ruch, USACE, gave the opening talk at the GIS and Water Resources VII conference this week. It reminded me of the days when great engineers like Stephens and Roebling had the daring to stick their necks out to make big, critical decisions. The good colonel did exactly that.

The Missouri River experienced record flooding in 2011. By June, the levee near Hamburg, Iowa, started to collapse. Now, the flood plain here — the one that existed before the levees — is huge, as large as a big reservoir. It would take days to fill, but the Missouri had plenty of water and time to fill it. The Corps’ hydrologists forecast that Hamburg, a full five miles from the river, would come under 10 feet of water, and recommended building an emergency levee.

Now get this picture. Col. Ruch is standing on a highway outside of Hamburg. His hydrologists are telling him a flood is coming, and he needs to spend a couple of million dollars to save the town. But, his boots are perfectly dry, and the river is far away. Should he believe the scientists? In short, Col. Ruch had ample opportunity to rationalize a really stupid decision. Fortunately, he had the integrity and good judgement to trust his staff.

The water finally did come to Hamburg … and stopped inches from the top of the emergency levee. Yea Corps of Engineers and Col. Ruch! Moral of the story: the science works; climate-change deniers, take note.

The official JAWRA editorial fountain pen.

My trusty old fountain pen has been discharged from the Mont Blanc pen hospital. They had to transport it to Germany for the operation. It’s like new! They even tightened how the cap fits, to undo 30 years of wear.

Yea Mont Blanc! I can write again!

I recently tried to put together an upcoming talk using only my word processor. Normally, I would start by sketching an outline with my pen. Honestly, it was hard to think, and the online outline looks a mess. May have to start over the old fashioned way!

Like every editor on the planet, I have been bombarded the past week with emails from the Heartland Institute decrying the activities of Peter Gleick in exposing some of their internal materials. I might have been tempted to tighten the spam settings for a conservative, anti-climate change outfit like this, but, as they say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Peter is in hot water because he apparently mixed the roles of scientist and journalist. Heartland also is feeling heat because some of the things he exposed seem shady. A Congressional investigation has been called for. (Ooh, that will get to the truth! ) Strange business. I hope the outcome does not deprive us of an outspoken voice for science.