[Ansteorra] Warlord

[Burke McCrory]

At 03:00 PM 5/27/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>I was just thinking, are we aggravating the flooding problem?  The water
>flow through the merchant's area was not coming from the direction of
>the hall or parking lot, it seemed to be coming more from the direction
>of the list field.  The pavilions keep the rain from hitting the ground
>and soaking in and so adds to the runoff problem.  How many pavilions
>were up and what were their size?  If this line of reasoning is correct,
>we need to watch were we locate our list fields and merchant areas or we
>will make flooding problems worse.  It seems to me that we are seeing
>more flooding problems at many events.  Some of this is that the type of
>areas set aside for temporary uses, like fairs or camps, tend to be low
>lying.  Higher ground tends to be more expensive and it is put to other
>more profitable uses.  Above all, we need to remember that a 4-6 inch
>rain in an hour or so, will cause flooding anywhere, not just the Canton
>site.
>
>Cairenn

No, the list field and pavilions (which were mostly all down by the time it
rained) are not part of the problem.  I had the chance on several occasions
during the flood to be out on the far west side of the camp and observed
where much of the problem is coming from.  Our problem is the fields
(archery and equestrian) to the west of the list field as well as the
surrounding grasslands.  All that surface area (several dozen acres) drains
into the creek that runs on the back (south) side of the area and that
creek is just to small and narrow to handle that much runoff.  Plus all of
the area around the list field drains straight down into where the royal
pavilion usually is.  While the rain that fell earlier in the week didn't
help, no ground is going to be able to handle the amount of water that we
received in such a short time.  What we experienced was a classic flash
flood and the best tine to do with them is get out of the way.  The
flooding that the merchants experienced was simply all of the water from
western side of the whole site running through that narrow creek.  Short of
building levies nothing would have helped.  One thing people must remember
in cases such as this.  If you don't know how deep the water is DO NOT
DRIVE your car into it.  Several of the cars that flooded out were the
result of people just trying to make it through water that was too
deep.  If the water is more than 9" deep it can stall out most cars and
even sweep smaller ones away.  At times the water was running 3+ feet deep
over the roads in places and that will drown out and throw even a large SUV
or Truck around.


Burke