Fans and Floods – All Over??

We have reached the end of our series of columns about alluvial fans. We just have a few more issues to pursue here today. The first is how many of them there are. We began studying these fans in the autumn of 2011, right after Hurricane Irene left the Catskills. We set off following in Irene’s wake. We were interested in seeing the damage that she had left behind. We traveled to nearby Windham first and, as soon as we could, we went to Prattsville and then Margaretville and Middleburgh. Everywhere we saw the damage – broken bridges, shattered sidewalks and unpassable roads – empty home foundations and occasional landslides. We frequently found stream channels clogged with broken trees. Our whole region was a horrible mess, and we were privileged to witness what had occurred. Neither of us had ever seen a great natural catastrophe before. We were truly horrified. We will never forget our experiences. Never!

And then we were truly privileged to comprehend what had happened. We began to understand what those alluvial fans were and where they were. They were all over the Catskills and they were best displayed where the flooding had been greatest. As we explained a couple of columns ago, those fans were blocking the valleys, and the backup of the waters were what people call floods – lots of floods.

Yes, we saw fans in Windham and in Middleburgh and Margaretville. We saw the most effective fan in Prattsville. But not all of them caused floods. We found three of them in Delhi and a very good one in Cooperstown, but none of those caused floods.

Then there’s a story about the practice of science here that might be worth telling. We, as scientists, were pulled to all this. Our journeying through the Catskills back in 2011 might be called an exercise in “pure” or “basic” science. We were just out there looking at things. We had nothing particular in mind – at first. We just knew there had been a horrible hurricane, and this was a (we hoped) once in a lifetime chance to get out and see what had happened. We knew what alluvial fans were, but we had never spent much time even thinking about them, let alone studying and mapping them.

But there they were and it soon became obvious how important they had become on that fateful August day. Our broadbrush survey of the Catskills had led to an interpretation of how the floods had come along. That’s a common story in science. You begin a study and pursue it, and only then does an important story emerge. Not many people understand that, and it gets scientists in trouble from time to time. That leads us back to a little American history.

Long ago there was a Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin) who commonly issued something that he called his “Golden Fleece Awards”. These were supposedly ridiculous scientific studies that had been sponsored by government research grants, especially from the National Science Foundation. They were, all of them Proxmire thought, silly squandering’s of taxpayer money.  That would not have happened to us. The two of us pay for all of our Mountain Eagle research. Most of those expenses are just gasoline. But how would Senator Proxmire have felt if the government had funded a study of “The hazards of alluvial fans in the Catskills?” Yep, we might well have received a Golden Fleece Award.

We hope that you get our point: politics and science are a poor mix.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their Facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com."