Blog | Land & Watersheds — Water Resources Insights

The latest water resources news, articles, and practices

Past Floods and Storms

Within Five Inches: Michigan's Spring 2026 Floods and the Infrastructure They Exposed Michigan's spring 2026 floods were a textbook rain-on-snow disaster: a record March snowpack, then record April rain on top of it, fed by an extraordinarily warm Gulf of Mexico. Dozens of counties went under a state of emergency, and at the peak the state's dam safety unit was watching roughly 40 dams that threatened to fail. The crisis came closest at the Cheboygan Lock and Dam, where floodwater rose to within five inches of overtopping before crews repowered a derelict, privately owned hydro plant and restored enough capacity to pass the flow. The event echoed the 2020 Midland dam failures and exposed two systemic gaps: an aging, underfunded dam inventory (often privately held, weakly enforced) and floodplain maps that miss rural areas entirely and are structurally blind to rainfall-driven flooding, leaving thousands uninsured and unaware they were at risk. Months on, the waters have receded but none of those underlying failures has been fixed.

News

The Colorado River "Day Zero" Crisis: What It Means for Water Supply in 2026 and Beyond The Colorado River is nearing "Day Zero." Discover what's driving the 2026 water crisis, which communities are at risk, and the smart solutions that can prevent collapse.

News

The Thirsty Machine: Why AI Is a Water Resources Problem, Not Just a Tech One AI runs on water, not just code. Every prompt generates heat that data centers shed by evaporating freshwater, and the power feeding those servers consumes still more at the plant. A June 2026 UN University report put global data center water use at 4.5 trillion liters in 2025, on track to reach 9.3 trillion by 2030. This post breaks down where the water actually goes, why the viral "bottle per prompt" figure is a system-boundary problem rather than a fact, how data centers are triggering real resource conflicts in already water-stressed basins, and why "water positive" pledges deserve a hydrologist's skepticism when water, unlike carbon, is always local. The takeaway for water resources engineers: a large data center is a new consumptive demand on a basin and should be evaluated with the same rigor as any other major withdrawal. If you want it shorter for a CMS excerpt field, here is a tighter version: AI is a water problem, not just a tech one. Data centers consumed 4.5 trillion liters of freshwater in 2025 and could reach 9.3 trillion by 2030. A water resources engineer's look at where the water goes, why the local basin is what matters, and why "water positive" pledges need scrutiny. Want me to also draft an SEO title tag and a set of focus keywords to go with it for the Webflow entry?

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

News

The World Has Entered an Era of Global Water Bankruptcy. Here's What That Means.The UN has declared the world has entered the era of Global Water Bankruptcy. Learn what this means for water resources, infrastructure design, and the communities bearing the greatest costs.