Floods

   I wanted to see if my house was susceptible to flooding so I went to This website. I typed in my address and the website pulled up my street. Then what I did was clicked the button labeled interactive map. This opened a new tab with a map showing where my house was and the risk of flooding. My house had a minimal risk of flooding.

   Three techniques to prevent flooding are a dam, artificial levees, and seawalls. A dam is structure designed to block the flow of water in a river. A dam also can control the amount of water it releases, and most dams are built to capture the energy of the flowing water changing it into electricity. Artificial levees are built on the edge of rivers or other bodies of water and increase the height of the banks of the river making the river have to raise much higher in order to flood. The levees are normally made out of concrete or another impermeable (impermeable - not allowing fluids to pass through) material that is resistant to erosion. A seawall is a very simplistic approach to coastal flooding. All a seawall consists of is a relatively small wall built be the shore. A seawall is much like a levee but is built by the shore and would most likely extend higher then a levee.

   I live in the Newton - Conover area we don't have that many floods but we had one a couple years ago. I think that if we had used even just really small levees then we could have prevented most of the over flowing water.