The river flooded in 1938, tearing out bridges and trestles. It killed more than 100 people, trapped movie stars on their San Fernando Valley ranches, and forced a three-day delay in the Oscars. The water tore away the Warner Brothers studio’s prop department.
That flood wrote the real river’s death warrant. It was the Depression; L.A. needed jobs, not a killer river. The river was timbered and troughed and cemented over, mile after mile. Only in parts of its 51-mile bed would it assert itself and remain persistently unpaveable: for about three miles around Atwater Village, and along more than two miles at the broad reach of the Sepulveda dam wildlife area.
It took 20 years and 3.5 million barrels of cement, and now we have a paved river as a testament to the hubris of man. fwiw, it did not solve the floods this year.
To use available technology and information of the day in an attempt to improve outcomes for millions of people.
> It killed more than 100 people
I guess that doesn't "irk" some people. I suppose they've adopted a mindset that the dead somehow "deserved" it for some imagined choice they made, or that humanity as a whole "deserves" to be doomed.
> as a testament to the hubris of man
Engineering is an act of compromise. One that has mostly worked in our favor. You can either give up because we are incapable of perfection or you can dig in and try to make the next incremental improvement.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-02-08/lives-s...
Hellish for humans to walk about and navigate, sure.
Very good for temperature stabilisations, wetland life, water retention in areas that would otherwise drain and dry out, etc.
That has pluses and minuses.
For one, it’s really terrible living in an area that beavers insist on turning into swamps, if you don’t prefer swamps.
Having some swamps somewhere, does help nature though.
Just like it’s terrible not having a roof over your head, or getting flooded out.
Having some flooding somewhere is good for nature though.
Prior generations optimized for getting housing in place quickly and cheaply, and having predictable flooding behavior even if it looked ugly.
And they got it.
What should we optimize for now?
pick your poison. Pros/cons, etc.
They are terrible, but I think the alternative was probably not to build in places like Huntington Beach (population 200,000).
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-01/why-we-t...
For some time now, Los Angeles and Orange County have been in the process of adding soil and plants to the bottoms of the concrete channels.
Here’s the website for the L.A. river revitalization.
My city got tired of the river flooding the downtown area, so decided to reroute the river. Of course, they made it much straighter than it would naturally form. So nearly a century later, they started to go back and add in bends and areas for the water to pool in areas. It has done a lot in a positive direction.