Be a Junior Forensic Hydrologist! One Weird Trick for Staying Dry in Flood-Time #scflood

Last updated on: October 6, 2015 at 9:52 am by Jennifer Fitz

Be a Junior Forensic Hydrologist! One Weird Trick for Staying Dry in Flood-Time #scflood 2015-10-06T09:52:34-05:00 Jennifer Fitz

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Still have power? Internet? Here’s a fun game you can play at home to add verve to your obsessive trolling of SC flood photos. (Me? Do that?) What you’ll need is a photo with a caption and Google Earth.

Using those clues, you, too, can identify which dams have failed and which are (probably) still standing. You can do it all from the comfort of your living room, and with no pesky PhD to bother about. If there’s not a dam breaking over your house, everyone thanks you for staying firmly seated and conjecturing from afar.

Note: Before you begin this game, check real quick on the condition of the dams above your house. All good? If not, remove to high ground before you continue.

We’ll play a few times so you get the hang of it.

Our first photo was posted on Facebook without a caption (witness the arguments in the combox over that), of a flooded bridge. I originally thought it was from the coast, but a friend gave me the necessary clue: Nursery Road.

Go look up “Nursery Road, Columbia, SC” on Google maps. Right now. When you find it, scroll along the road until you see a pond (or two, in this case) that just might be the dam failure. Find it yet? It feeds into Rawl’s Creek.

Now switch to Street View, and voila! You’re looking at the non-flooded bridge. And you, Junior Hydrologist, have just identified the probable dam failure that flooded that bridge. Neat, huh? Didn’t even need an umbrella.

Let’s do another one.

This one took me a few minutes to figure out, because I knew too much. The captions reads, “Fox Hall Road in Forest Acres.” Because I knew Forest Acres is in Columbia, I foolishly Googled “Fox Hall Road, Columbia, SC.” Big mistake. Google recognizes Forest Acres as the independent, if wholly surrounded, town that it is. Use the original caption for your search, and Google Maps takes you right to the place, despite the minor spelling variation.

Now you’ve found the road, but where did the water come from?

The obvious place to look is that creek that intersects Foxhall, and if you didn’t use Street View to verify, you might settle for assuming you were looking at damage from the (unnamed on Google) pond that feeds Eight Mile Branch.

You’d be wrong, conjectures this Junior Amateur Hydrologist. The houses don’t match. After some fruitless searching, I took another look at the map of Foxhall, and noticed there’s a small pond backing up to a different section of the road. Zoom in to Street View at 3423, and you’ll see that now you’ve got the house that matches the photo. You can see on Street View the drainage culvert that matches the flood scene in the Facebook photo.

Now go back to the map, and we Junior Hydrologists can conclude that it was the small pond facing Pine Belt that either overflowed or gave way.

Now you try it at home! All you need are some lightly-captioned photos and you’re off. It’s no longer necessary to go wandering around the state gawking and wearing out the whitewater rescue teams when you get swept away in the fresh dam failures that are going to continue until the entire weather system has had its chance to drain into the Atlantic.

You can impress your friends with your knowledge of SC water systems, all while impressing emergency services with your newfound ability to stay inside and off the roads.

Ireland, we have your weather here. Please come take it home now.

Map: South Carolina, 1889. Rand Mcnally & Co. (National Public Domain Archive) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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