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The 2006 flood heights in Delaware and Otsego Counties, NY |
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Back to 2006 Flood Introduction/main page SUNY Oneonta home |
Why care
about documenting the flood heights from a storm and flood that is now fading
into the past? Some of the reasons to document this event are fairly obvious.
If an event has occurred once, it can always come back again. If your home
suffered damage, it might still be in harm’s way. While measuring the size of
flood events is somewhat academic, determining the frequency of such events
is very important for planning and hazard assessment purposes. But
there are other reasons too. Here’s my list, in bulleted form: ·
Many of the stream gages in Otsego County, operated by the
USGS in the past, were decommissioned by the time this event occurred. The
absence of well-quantified flood heights is disturbing to say the least.
While past records are helpful in giving us an idea of flood recurrence
intervals, many hydrologists think that flood frequency is changing due to
global warming. The only way to assess changes in flood frequency is by
recording high quality stream flow data over extended time periods.
Unfortunately, such record collection is diminishing in Otsego County. The
good news is that local stream monitoring efforts are in the process of
development, such as the stream and rainfall gaging work by students at
Sidney High School (contact Richard Townsend at SHS for more information). ·
Flood heights permit us to characterize water surface
slope and provide some estimates for mean flow velocity and friction at
higher flows. This in turn allows an assessment of fluid forces, and thus to
stream erosion and transport of solid material. Based on the photographic
record of flood damage, it is clear that substantial amounts of coarse
material (cobble to boulder size) were mobilized during peak flows. This
event could be used as an experimental study in sediment entrainment and
channel bank and bed erosion, if we could adequately characterize flow
conditions. ·
Flood heights in turn appear related to bank and bed
roughness in the lower order channels in the uplands of Otsego County, but to
date this relation lacks quantitative evaluation. Indeed, flood heights along
the smaller tributaries in the county have largely remained undocumented. |
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Page maintained by Les Hasbargen:
hasbarle@oneonta.edu Page initiated in May, 2008 |
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