Blog | Land & Watersheds — Water Resources Insights

The latest water resources news, articles, and practices

Practices

Nature-Based Solutions: Genuine Innovation or Greenwashed Common Sense?Bioswales, living shorelines, constructed wetlands, floodplain reconnection. Nature-based solutions are everywhere in engineering and planning right now. Some of them are genuinely transformative. Some of them are elaborate recreations of things we destroyed. The distinction matters.

Tutorial

Scour: The Word That Ends Projects. And the Budget Line Nobody Wants to Fund.You can design a perfect culvert, a perfect channel, a perfect outfall. Then a 10-year storm comes through and scours the bed out from under all of it overnight. Scour is the most underestimated force in drainage engineering, and the most expensive to ignore.

Practices

The Rational Method Is 150 Years Old. We Should Probably Talk About That.The most widely used stormwater formula in engineering practice was developed in 1889, before cars, before climate change, and before anyone imagined paving over entire watersheds. Q=CiA still works. It also has limits we consistently understate. Here's an honest assessment.

Past Floods and Storms

What Hurricane Maria Actually Taught Puerto Rico's Infrastructure (That Nobody Wants to Hear)Maria didn't just break Puerto Rico's infrastructure. It revealed what was already broken, what was never adequate to begin with, and what the engineering community still hasn't fully absorbed seven years later. The storm wasn't the surprise. The margins were.

Practices

The Floodplain Was There First. And It Has a Very Long Memory.Floodplains are flat because rivers made them flat, depositing sediment over thousands of years of periodic flooding. When we build cities on them and then act surprised when they flood, we are missing the entire point of what a floodplain actually is.

Practices

Your Detention Pond Might Be Someone Else's Flood Problem Detention basins are the stormwater management equivalent of a polite neighbor who parks their problem two houses down the street. When peak flow timing goes wrong, your fully permitted, fully functional pond can actually make downstream flooding worse. Here's why.

Practices

Puerto Rico's Karst: The Underground World That Doesn't Care About Your Drainage Design You can model every square foot of surface runoff with perfect accuracy and still be completely wrong about where the water goes. Welcome to karst terrain, where the standard rulebook politely stops working and the water does whatever it wants underground.

Practices

Your '100-Year Flood' Is Statistically Lying to You A 100-year flood doesn't happen once a century. It has a 1% chance of occurring every single year, and over a 30-year mortgage, your odds of experiencing one are closer to 1 in 4. Here's the math nobody puts in the real estate brochure.

We Built the World's Most Expensive Water Boomerang (And Then Were Shocked When It Came Back)For a century, engineers perfected the art of moving stormwater into rivers as fast as possible. Now those rivers are returning the favor, and suddenly everyone's surprised. A look at the beautiful, maddening irony of urban flood management.