STS 3700 Lecture 3 – Water Management Technologies Through the Ages
Flood Management in the Colonial Context
- Flood management for agricultural and damage prevention
- Did containment control or magnify damage?
Managing British Colonial Holdings
- Floods in the Orissa Delta in Colonial India
- Flood control embankments, flooding, cheap and easy to build
- Colonel Arthur Cotton, canals to control the river, irrigate, commerce
- Economic concerns, Indian Empire transferred to crown ownership (1858),
private capital was investing in transport networks
- Canals better than railways, equal investment, investment guarantees
- Investors and specialist authority on canals
- System slow to develop, under-utilized, government takeover in 1868
- Many irrigators did not use system, rate reductions, distinguishing between
licensed and unlicensed areas, rate collection
- Difficulties collecting rents
- Rainfall collection and traditional irrigation methods
- Laws against bunds, “small embankments created by cultivators to trap water
from drainage lines”
- Forms of water capture: ponds, tanks and drainage canals
- Government forced use of canal system rather than local sources
- Owners rate for land was to be increased when irrigation was added
- Embankments prevented smaller scale flooding, which brought fertilizing silt
- Canal problems: higher elevations could not take on canal water, lower regions
became waterlogged
- Determining fees for flood protection difficult
- Flooding had benefits, making it hard to charge for flood protection
Summary
- The British government encountered several problems when attempting to deal
with the periodic flooding of the delta:
- Dilemma similar to the Dutch, river control for revenue, land tenure and
trade, but control led to more flooding
- Making nature legible or measurable in order to commodify it was
problem
- Colonial authorities, commercial and environmental goals, the impact of
flooding on “…rent assesses and landed taxpayers”
- Duration of committment
- Their system neither stemmed the floods nor improved agriculture
- Hardships for the irrigators (costs, crops)
Modern Hydroelectric Power
- Canada 60% hydro, 90GW capacity, third largest hydroelectric energy producer
in the world (behind China and Brazil)
- Norway almost 100% hydro
-
James Bay Project: series of hydroelectric dams on the La Grande River in
Quebec, diversion of rivers
Damming rivers creates reservoirs, individual La Grande complex reservoirs over
1000 km2 in size, some dams as tall as 50 stories
North of Quebec, populations sparse, industrialization non-existent, native
hunting and fishing prominent
Facility generates approximately 15,000 megawatts = 16 CANDU reactors
Quebec electricity system provides approximately 35,000MW, 90% + hydro
20 billion to build complex
Initial resistance, settlements to Cree and Inuit populations
1975 agreement with Cree and Inuit, cash settlement, fishing and hunting rights
Extensive environmental consultation and analyses, scientifically informed
management of nature on a large scale
“Green” project, carbon neutral and thus not a contributor to global warming
Formal approval of native Canadian populations
Changing Nature
- Environmental concerns secondary to maximizing efficiency and power
generation
- Flooding destroyed a wide variety of plant and animal life (beaver, muskrat, hare,
otter, birds)
- Destroyed hunting areas used for thousands of years. 83,000 km of shoreline
- Reservoir drops in winter (high demand), rises in summer (demand low)
- Dead trees, fluctuating levels of water, large lifeless zone around reservoir
- Tributaries diverted to increase La Grande River flow drop in level, eliminating
species such as sturgeon, muskrat and beaver
- Heavy erosion of the banks of the La Grande
- Millions of trees planted for reforestation and erosion reduction, small portion of
total facility
- 1977 environmentalists and ecologists hired, approach cosmetic (moving around
topsoil) or simply a technological fix (sills, smaller dams to raise local water
level)
- For example, rather than clear timber before flooding, dead trees were harvested
and burned in a floating incinerator
- 45 biologists (in house scientists) completed survey of area
- Species adaptation: caribou radiotagged, new calving grounds and migration
- Animal culling
- Management of water flow, fiscal and productivity concerns
- 1984 redirection of water in system combined with heavy rains to lead to a herd
of 10,000 caribou drowning
- Narrow interests, blind to potential impacts
- Scott: large scale management to maximize productivity leaves out local
information with various costs and consequences
- McCutcheon: changing physical environment unpredictable despite use of science
- Fish populations shifted, cold lakes and shallow river species increased in number
- Reduction in biodiversity
-
Unintended consequence: increase in levels of poisonous methylmercury
Mercury in food chain, concentrated in species higher up the chain
Native populations and health risks from fish consumption
Changing native fishing patterns (social fix)
Is Hydroelectric Power “Green”?
- Project claimed to be environmentally sound, millions spent on studies
- Science determines impact, does not change direction, scale or management,
environmental concerns secondary to profit and productivity
- Northern ecosystems appear to be adaptable to change
o it takes time for the full impacts to be felt
o no independent data on the ecosystem before the project
- Major changes in land and its use, population levels
 Overall reduction in biodiversity
 Maximizing power output versus minimizing environmental impact,
adaptation of ecosystem