In the Argentina Pampas region, several agricultural land were flooded due to high rainfall and the rise of the water table. What engineering techniques can be applied to prevent flooding in plains?
Dear Horacio,
Techniques include the construction of dikes, lakes, dams, reservoirs, retention ponds to retain water during flooding.
With my best regards
Prof. Bachir ACHOUR
I have seen building dams upstream to regulate water flow being useful. But it depends on local context.
As indicated, there are several approaches, techniques. There is seldom a free lunch. Structures are costly to plan, design, maintain, with no guarantee to prevent failure. Somes the result is reduce flooding in one area but to increase flooding or flood hazard in another.
Sometimes there are reasons for flooding, such as sediment from hillslopes and gullies are filling channels, causing more flooding. Some soils do not perc well, so excess rainfall causes high water table. Also vegetation types may have different transpiration rates. Pine trees may transpire 2-3 times the water as compared to hardwoods and grasslands. Some soils exposed to high rainfall intensity will cause fine particles to fill macropores. Some soils compact more than others, or may have hard pans that need to be ripped to dissipate.
As Dr. Pant suggested, the local context can be very important, and as such, it is not appropriate to prescribe remedies without a full picture, which when considerating watershed manipulation, an integrated approach is generally suggested with varied professionals and discussion with neighbors, community. Water rights as well as aquatic habitats are sometimes involved.
In Romania we have some similar problems but the sources are the rain on the surrounding hills, but also due to some uncontrolled irrigations works, without the appropriate drainage works. So such uncontrolled irrigations have like consequences the rise of the water table level. In such cases the solutions are the appropriate land reclamation works (like the above mentioned), and in particular to build drainage networks. Shure, if the surfaces are very big, the costs are high.
Sub-surface drains may be used.
Deep ditches may also be used and channel to dams or big ponds
Also dams may be constructed and water harvest may be encouraged in the area
may attempt for creating avenues for large scale artificial ground water recharging by facilitating vertical movemnet as fast and as much it can be...but all depends on local site conditions...the excess parcels of flood volumes needs to be safely economically and rapidly shifted to ground water bodies even may be in wells or local acquifers. this could be one innovative way to dampen the flood peaks atleast....
the excess water if any way diverted or spread over the adjacent forest or grassed area it will be relatively a easy task...
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