Breaking Down the Different Types of Flood Control Methods

Floods are considered one of the most frequent and costly natural disasters in the United States. They’re often caused by hurricanes, heavy rainfall, overflowing rivers, broken dams and tsunamis. Like most natural disasters, it can be difficult to predict when flooding may strike, so it’s always important to be prepared. The best way to prepare? Invest in flood control.

There are two broad means of reducing the risks of floods:

• Nonstructural flood control – Removing people and property from risk areas.
• Structural flood control – Reconstructing landscapes to form blockades, protecting people and property on one side of the blockade from flood waters isolated on the other side of this control structure.

The history of the area now comprising Valley Ranch originally utilized simple nonstructural flood control. For hundreds of years, this land either went unused or was largely utilized in grazing livestock. When flooding impacted the area, the animals moved to higher ground until the waters receded.

However, higher value usage of land usually means building structures and constructing infrastructure, such as roads, sidewalks and utilities. Once in place, flood control becomes a matter of studying the topography of the land, modeling how flood waters and constructing facilities to redirect excess ground water away from assets created in the community – the basis of structural flood control.

Common techniques used for structural flood control include installing rock berms or sandbags, maintaining natural slopes with vegetation, adding soil and applying cement on steeper slopes, and constructing or expanding drainage channels. Other methods of structural flood control include the creation and maintenance of levees, dikes, dams, retention walls and detention basins.

If these methods sound familiar, that’s because IFCD 3 utilizes these right here in Valley Ranch, including the levee behind our pump station, as well as the canals, ponds, sluice gates and pumps we use during heavy rain and snowstorms.

As we continue providing flood control efforts to Valley Ranch, we’re also exploring additional means to continue keeping Valley Ranch protected from flooding. One of these new methods is the installation of a tilting weir dam. To learn more about this method of flood control, read our previous blog post about tilting weir dams!

To learn more about IFCD 3 and our mission to deliver flood control to Valley Ranch, explore the rest of our website, or connect with us on Facebook and Twitter.