...but now all that rain has to go somewhere, and around here that means the Grand River, awfully close to our house. So far, it has been a good year for flooding and we hope it stays that way.
I think we may have been April fooled this morning. The river is high - no doubt about that; I can see it from my desk - but a look at the Grand River Conservation Authority's website indicates that the flow rate in Kitchener is nearly three times the rate down at York, most of the way to Lake Erie. Unless someone pulled the drain plug out of the river in Brantford, my guess is that an evil GRCA employee changed the colours on the graph. Will check back this afternoon.
They must have done, and the river piled up again last night - quite exciting for a bit, but easing off somewhat now. It turned out that the puzzling flow rate indications were real, due to heavy rain and rapid runoff upstream, so the local peak took some hours to reach York. As a grey haired engineer, I might have figured this out for myself, of course, but I had never seen the effect so marked before. It is not unusual for the flow gauges to fail, giving spurious (or no) readings.
Interesting. Unfortunately the TTC seems to be running on the same model these days.
(The actual issue is that when they built the system way back when they installed turnbacks only every 8 stations or so, so shutting down one section of track for whatever reason shuts down several kilometres of track.)
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If you are interested, the GRCA has an excellent website with flow stats presented here: https://www.grandriver.ca/our-watershed/river-data/river-and-stream-flows/central-lower-grand-flows/. They are doing a good job in spite of efforts to cut their funding.
(The actual issue is that when they built the system way back when they installed turnbacks only every 8 stations or so, so shutting down one section of track for whatever reason shuts down several kilometres of track.)