This is a stupid question mostly because I don’t know where to ask it. Also it seems like an obvious thing but I’ve never read any news mentioning ……
I was just reading an article going over recent flooding catastrophes and one thing that stood out was a dam adding to the high water by having to release water while the flooding was still happening.
But can’t dam operators see a storm forecast and start drinking, er draining, ahead of time? It’s seems like you could make a big difference in controlling flooding with just a day or two pregaming. That can’t be profound, so why does it never seem to be mentioned? It could be a significant factor on many floods, a critical use for NWS data, forecasts, warnings, so where are the news mentions?
Dams are set up in an area that a large amount of surrounding area naturally flows water into.
That’s why dams are constantly letting water out, even when it hasn’t rained.
So like, so X is the total amount of water before the dam overflows. You’d want to keep normal level at X - 25%. But if a storm is coming in they do pre-emptively open the floodgates and go down to X - 50% or whatever.
One of the big problems is these large storms last so long, days rather than hours. And even if they open the floodgates at the dam to help the lake, it makes it worse for people along the river it feeds into.
There’s no simple solution, we already started doing all that decades ago. It’s what was hiding the problem and why so many ignored it and it got so bad.