Water

100 year flood 💧

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100 year flood 💧

A 100 year flood is one that has a 1% chance of happening in any particular year. That is the level of risk that the government declares as within a flood plain, and requires flood insurance to purchase a government backed mortgage.

You might think that a 100 year flood occurs every one hundred years or your guaranteed a single flood every 100 years but that’s not how probability works. A 100 year flood only has a 63.3% chance of happening at least once each century.

The formula for probability over time is:

C = Chance in percent of winning
T = The number of times your running the probability
P = Percent chance of winning over time

(1 - (1-C) ) ^ T = P

(1- (1 - 0.01) ) ^ 20 = 0.182 or 18.2% flood risk over 20 years.

A 100 year flood plain has a 63.3% chance of flooding over 100 years, 86.6% chance over 200 years, and 95.0% chance over 300 years.

How Careless I’m With Water.

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I was thinking the other day how careless I can be with water …

I rent and my landlord pays for the water, 💦 obstinately through my rent payment. The landlord sometimes complains how high the water bill is 💸 and suggests his tenants do more to save water. But water is cheap and plentiful, and I honestly I don’t think that much about it when I wash dishes or take a shower. But I probably should.

Water is not free to produce and it certainly is not free dispose of. Waste-water treatment is particularly energy intensive, and like many towns, there is a mixture of energy-intensive sewage pumps and gravity that take waste-water down to the treatment plant and heat and mechanically disturb it purify of many of the worse contaminates before dumping it into the Hudson River.

I am certainly a lot more careful about my water use when camping, as I am usually limited to the six gallons I have in the two three-gallon containers I have. I can usually re-fill them every few days, but that water has to used for all cooking and cleaning purposes. I often use paper plates and bowls, and try to avoid as many dishes as possible, but some cleaning is always necessary. But conservation is the name of the game in the wilderness — even when I’m washing dishes, I’m trying to minimize water use as much as possible by scrubbing them out with paper towels, rising and soaping them with as little water as possible.

When I own my own land, and an off-grid place, water conservation will be the name of the game, especially if I don’t have an always-on water pump. ☸ There is nothing wrong with using a water tank up on the second floor and using gravity for flow. That’s the most energy efficient way to go, although you gain muscle yourself by hauling water upstairs. But if you filling the water by hand, you much more likely to conserve it. And conservation is the name of game. If I had a septic system, I would make sure to keep food waste separated out in the sink for compost, and used toilet paper in a wastebasket for incineration in a burn barrel. As who wants to pay to have their tank pumped, with all the solids ultimately going to a landfill?

Conservation is important, but it’s not really part of the modern suburban experience. I’m sure the landlord wishes I did more, and I probably should try harder, but all the incentives are wrong when you have easily pumped and pressurized water as your disposal.

Camp

how Americans stopped trusting their water | Kentucky | The Guardian

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‘It smells bad, it tastes bad’: how Americans stopped trusting their water | Kentucky | The Guardian

Reed, 63, grew up drinking the crystalline water from wells and local springs dotted throughout the Appalachian mountains in Martin county, but switched to bottled while raising her own family amid safety fears linked to coal mining and mismanagement at the utility.

‘We’ve always known ours was contaminated’: the trouble with America’s water She’s not alone: 96% of residents rely primarily on bottled water for drinking, and only 56% use tap water for cooking, according to a recent study by the University of Kentucky.

The tap water smells strongly of chlorine, like a swimming pool, and residents frequently report problems with bad taste, discolouration, sediment and irritated or burning skin after bathing.

NPR

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Rare Meteorites Show How The Earth Got Its Life-Giving Water : NPR

A new study in the journal Science suggests that the Earth likely got a lot of its precious water from the original materials that built the planet, instead of having water arrive later from afar.

The researchers who did this study went looking for signs of water in a rare kind of meteorite. Only about 2% of the meteorites found on Earth are so-called enstatite chondrite meteorites. Their chemical makeup suggests they're close to the kind of primordial stuff that glommed together and produced our planet 4.5 billion years ago.