Why Engineers Can't Control Rivers

💧 The unintended consequences of trying to change the course of rivers
See Part 1 of this series here: • Why Rivers Move
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Practical Engineering is a KZbin channel about infrastructure and the human-made world around us. It is hosted, written, and produced by Grady Hillhouse. We have new videos posted regularly, so please subscribe for updates. If you enjoyed the video, hit that ‘like’ button, give us a comment, or watch another of our videos!
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This is not engineering advice. Everything here is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Contact an engineer licensed to practice in your area if you need professional advice or services. All non-licensed clips used for fair use commentary, criticism, and educational purposes.
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This video is sponsored by Brilliant.
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Source: • Elexive - Tonic and En...
Producer/Writer/Host: Grady Hillhouse
Editor: Wesley Crump
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Script Editor: Ralph Crewe
Background Painting: Josh Welker
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[@PracticalEngineeringChannel]

💧Huge thanks to the Emriver team for hosting us at their headquarters and helping to produce these videos! Check them out at emriver.com 💡Level up your math and science skills with Brilliant: brilliant.org/PracticalEngineering

[@csehszlovakze]

5:42 we did this to the Tisza river in the 1800's and now we have pretty bad droughts.

[@Britishfurryrectifiersucker]

The overall concept of this video is an incorrect and bold claim, especially the title without context. Many examples over the world flop that claim. With a hydraulic civil engineering degree specialising in drainage systems engineering on a philosophical level, i should refer to the fact us type of engineers have the expertise to divert, dam and control rivers, even send then underground in systems of culverts which direct them under populated cities for miles into dedicated networks that relieve other more prioritised bodies from hydraulic overload which could pose risks to wildlife etc.

[@DunkinDonutGoesFast]

​@@Britishfurryrectifiersucker at least watch the video before you comment 🤦

[@csehszlovakze]

@@DunkinDonutGoesFast it's probably a bot

[@lj8549]

I would have loved these practical demonstrations back when I was in school! Highly recommend you visit schools with these models and presentations, the children would love it and it'd inspire so much critical thinking, learning and exploration. Hats off to you!

[@LarsMarowskyBree]

So basically those 3 million subscribers give you access to the toys every kindergarten engineer dreamed off. I'm absolutely not jealous at all! Well done.

[@navalgarg_19]

So true bro😂

[@Solonghoney]

So true

[@randommcranderson5155]

I don't know if you noticed, but he's travelled to a lab somewhere to get access to that toy. Thats probably in a university hydrology lab somewhere, or its the manufacturer's facility.

[@anteshell]

@@randommcranderson5155 Please, notice the difference between "get access to" and "to own". Your response would only make sense if he said the latter, but he did not.

[@hayleyxyz]

​@@anteshell can we just chill please

[@gownerjones1450]

Where I grew up in Germany, it was customary to have a hand crank water pump in children's sandboxes on playgrounds. As kids, we would spend HOURS creating river channels, dams, bridges and stuff like that. It's incredible how play at a young age like this can hone your intuition on complicated engineering concepts like this.

[@SpencerLemay]

I made quite the canyon in my parents yard leaving the garden hose on for nearly the entire summer.

[@joebidenshusband6593]

@@SpencerLemaywhat was the water bill 😂

[@ItsAVolcano]

And my ongoing theory that Germans get a secret +5 to civil engineering at birth gets even more credible.😅

[@SpencerLemay]

@@joebidenshusband6593 It was less than what my parents said it was. However the erosion was pretty gnarly and we nearly lost the riding lawn mower in it.

[@w1-em4nq]

@@ItsAVolcano i am always impressed by the current german engineering system. i thought the same thing, they always seem so ahead of the curve on engineering. German management came in and the first year revenue increased 25% and was more profitable.

[@matprlz]

Laughs in Dutch

[@uninvincibleete]

This is so fantastic! It's one thing to hear "sediment builds up" but it's entirely different to feel the anxiety as you watch the particles stack closer and closer to a 'dam'. What a terrific learning tool and what wonderful work.

[@Leyrann]

In the Netherlands, most major rivers have flood plains at least some three to four times the width of the river's regular channel, and there are significant restrictions on things like construction in those areas (e.g. no permanent buildings). Whenever I see pictures or videos of rivers in other countries, in particular outside Europe, the lack of such flooding areas always stands out to me more than anything else - there's several examples of such footage in this video, in fact. If you're planning on making more videos on this topic, I can recommend looking into the Dutch "Ruimte voor de Rivier" (room for the river) program, which aimed to further improve the quality of rivers, often based on the long-term consequences discussed in this video. At the risk of being a little self-congratulatory (though we probably deserve it; we have a reputation when it comes to water management), the Netherlands are pretty good at executing projects like this.

[@ivanskyttejrgensen7464]

Skjern River in Denmark is also an interesting example. It was straightened in the 60ies. Then 43km of it were un-straightened in 2002 due to the undesired effects of the straghtening.

[@arailway8809]

Hi Leyrann, We often put soccer fields and baseball fields on flood plains. In my childhood we lived by a river that was about 100 feet across normally. The second "bank," at least on our side, was about 15 feet above that and some 50 feet across and was dominated by willow trees. Some 20 feet above that was a level plain with oak trees. It extended out for 2000 feet. The main record of that bank being under water was during the hurricane of 1936.

[@zengerz]

look into viktor schauberger, a forest man who studies nature and knows water flows due to implosion etc.. Also dutch folklore describes them as descendants of other water masters called atlanteans

[@bobbienl1]

True, the room for the river is quite an interesting project. To be fair, the dutch had to learn from their mistakes first as well. Houses have been, and are still being build in the floodplains (uiterwaarden). We also ruined our ecosystems with canalization, which we are trying to fix now. I guess we learned from our mistakes earlier than other parts of the world, because we started "controlling" our water earlier.

[@Duiker36]

@@zengerz I'm sorry, did you just suggest that the magical city invented by extremely ancient Greek guy Plato is part of Dutch folklore? How does that work?

[@deonmurphy6383]

Your model of a dam in a flume, filling with sediment reminded me of a story from a dive master about a dive at Imperial Dam: The dive was intended to determine if there was a need to dredge behind the dam. So the diver went off of the dive boat, then stood up and said “yeah it’s time to dredge.”

[@anna_in_aotearoa3166]

😂 Classic!!

[@Eric-xh9ee]

Why didn't they just use sonar to detect the depth? These systems are very cheap and are on almost all boats.

[@Muljinn]

At that point, they could have just used a stick…

[@conlanhinkel2022]

@@Eric-xh9ee its a joke bro

[@nercksrule]

The Garrison Dam in North Dakota has its downstream outflow at the lowest point of the dam, allowing sediment to pass through. The water near the intakes is almost 200ft deep.

[@BrainstechKnowlogy]

That river toy is amazing. hahaha! I wish I have them when I was a kid.

[@rickclark7508]

Fr we would be having boat races

[@wilhelmbetz3565]

We have one in our city, we call it water experience house (translated 1 to 1). It's acctually fun.

[@BrainstechKnowlogy]

@@rickclark7508 hahahaha. yeah!

[@BrainstechKnowlogy]

@@wilhelmbetz3565 its looks really fun. =)

[@benhickman8733]

I had one in 7th or 8th grace science and I would give anything to go back to that class

[@pRahvi0]

As someone from a country with comparatively little soil over bedrock and practically all foundations supported by solid rock down to several kilometers, I keep finding myself surprised how much trouble other people get from things not staying where you put them due to erosion.

[@TheJawRaw]

What country if you don’t mind me asking :)

[@certaindeath7776]

even the mountains move... some very old ones do very slow, but there are also pretty active ones

[@KawaiiEvoMii]

Probably China@@TheJawRaw Look up Tofu dregs, very interesting/sad

[@millvillenackawicbaptistch3917]

@@TheJawRaw In Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada there is solid bedrock just a few feet under most of the peninsular part of the city which can be seen when excavation happens for construction and in some house basements.

[@yetanotherstronk]

Where the bedrock is close to the surface, erosion can still be tricky. I worked for a while in Freetown, Sierra Leone, which is built on the slopes of a mountain descending into the sea. Most of the soil in the city has been scoured away to bedrock by tropical rains. When you remove vegetation on a slope, the soil disappears. Sometimes - sadly - at speed and with the buildings and people who were on top of it, no matter if the foundations were in rock.

[@LaczPro]

Those guys are amazing with their river models. It's just so satisfying to see something that difficult to understand happening in front on your eyes.

[@michaelmathews295]

Looks fun too, playing in a sandbox with toys.

[@ElSantoLuchador]

You should check out the Puget Sound Tidal model. That's river modeling ^2.

[@thithi8793]

ok

[@be4tnl]

in the Netherands you can find them quit often in kids playgrounds...

[@johnsmith1474]

The sentence: "It's just so satisfying to see something that difficult to understand happening in front on your eyes" is absolutely inane. Games have destroyed your mind.

[@Theawes0me0neProject]

Grady, I started watching your KZbin videos back in high school over 5 years ago. I am now in my last term of my senior year of college about to graduate with a bachelors in civil engineering. I just want to say thank you for marking these videos and helping to inspire the future of civil engineers, and helping them get through their classes!

[@PracticalEngineeringChannel]

This is so nice. Congratulations and best of luck in your job search!

[@SprachenLernenTurboLinga]

@@PracticalEngineeringChannel I would be willing to bet that Jacob is representative of quite a few individuals whose career paths have been inspired at least partially by this channel! So appreciative of the work you do!

[@phillyphakename1255]

​@@SprachenLernenTurboLinga not to mention the countless others who found civil engineering to be a helpful side quest to stay fascinated by engineering while they are learning about some other field.

[@jamesmcpherson3924]

Remember to not build your city like a river.

[@carrioncrow8191]

I was staying at a beach house a few years ago, and one night I watched a guy pull his sailboat across the beach into an estuary. I guess they wanted to protect it or something. Anyways, the next morning, the trough created by dragging the keel through the sand, had created a channel for the waves to completely erode the entire bank that had once separated the two. This was like 5 foot deeper than what it once was, and incredible to see. I bet a time lapse video would have been awesome to see.

[@joshyoung1440]

So that moron basically ruined an estuary? Lol or did they fix it somehow, or was it just not as big of a deal as I'm picturing?

[@1248erik]

There is plenty of videos of this. Seach for example for "RAW: How a RIVER WAVE FORMS START TO FINISH"

[@mislavpetarkelava92]

@@1248erik i went and checked out the video. gotta say pretty cool example. thanks for sharing ☺

[@ryanc473]

This reminds me of something I always used to do at the beach as a kid growing up (that my Dad kinda taught me, to be honest). Every time I'd go to the beach, one major thing I'd do (usually with the help of my brothers and/or my dad/friends) is to dig a pit up on the shore somewhere, then dig a channel from that pit down to the ocean. We'd carve twists and turns and even plateaus (which would make waterfalls) and occasionally even tunnels into the channel, then haul buckets of water from the ocean into the pit and watch as the water would flow through our creation. It was always an ongoing project though, as inevitably too sharp of a twist would cause a stream to break through straight and make a downstream connection we never would've forseen. And the waterfalls would slowly erode the cliff until it was no longer a fall but rather a gentle slope (that, or it would simply dig almost a second pit into the ground, creating a little pond along the way as a result). Tunnels would inevitably collapse (usually rather swiftly) as the base was slowly eroded away, causing a huge lump of sand that would either force a ton of new channels to form or would be quickly eroded away, depending on, well, whatever it depended on. It was always so incredibly fun, and is a game I very much hope to be able to pass on my kids some day. Taught me a ton about how rivers work without me ever realizing it lol

[@chadneumann9217]

That river table is basically my childhood dream toy. I used to get ‘in trouble’ by using the hose to create my own waterways. I still love watching what water does during high rain times today.

[@teamredshirt]

Dug a hole with a hose once when i was a kid. Was great fun, unfortunately i started it in the middle of the asphalt drive way. Dad wasn't as thrilled with it as i was.

[@chadneumann9217]

@@matthewnienkirchen8083 just a good scolding.

[@safe-keeper1042]

When I went to elementary school we had playgrounds with a sand "surface" (like swingsets and whatnot), and the most fun thing to do was to play with the canals that formed when rain water ran through the sand. Fun times.

[@eleanormattice3598]

Engineers and city planners should design infrastructure and towns to live with a meandering river. Meandering is one of the ways rivers clean our water. It'll save us alot of money. We need to restore our watersheds and floodplains. That would help clean our water, recharge our aquiters and reduce floods while providing millions of jobs.

[@onerimeuse]

I had not heard of the LA river project until this video. I've been saying for years of California experiencing drought that it's so silly that the river system here is designed specifically to channel our rain water here out to the ocean, and doesn't do anything to harvest it. It warms my heart a bit that there is at least something being done in the direction of potentially fixing some of that problem.

[@onerimeuse]

@Karl with a K eh, beats them shitting in the streets

[@toxicpositivity9341]

@Karl with a K Oh no. People will have a nice place to be. How devastating.

[@jbudbuds4484]

look up tulare lake and you will see one of the biggest reason cali is always burning.

[@tyjohnson6570]

@jbudbuds4484 there’s a lake there?

[@jonoel6638]

@@toxicpositivity9341 yes until the homeless mess it up. That’s what that person was saying the model looks great but it will be destroyed by homeless populations

[@garywagner2466]

That takes me back to my fluvial geomorphology classes as an undergrad in the 1970s. Playing with stream tables and erosion models was a lot of fun. With all due respect, these issues were fairly well understood by physical geographers fifty years ago. It was the engineers who decided they could control dynamic natural systems with concrete and riprap. No amount of argument could sway them, and the real world evidence was ignored or downplayed. It is still going on, with unfortunate consequences. Sadly, fewer cross-discipline courses are offered these days. In my professional work, I often encounter young people who have never taken a geology, geography, biology, or indeed any sciences courses. How they got through university without any understanding of the natural world is astounding.

[@breakingborders]

Awesome video! I was in the bayou in the Atchafalaya basin. The locals told us the water has been rising, things are changing. Loved learning more about rivers.

[@Aeternum_Gaming]

the idea of 3 grown adults playing in a indoor sandbox with working, realistic fluid dynamics really makes me smile. Men never grow up. our toys just get bigger, fancier, and more expensive.

[@krisstargazer]

Dude, that's just science! 😄

[@zephyrus339]

The company I work for has a few off these indoor sandboxes too. They're the size of swimming pools.

[@GodlikeIridium]

True. But sometimes they're used for scientific experiments. So it's science, not men playing^^

[@lurchsteffenson275]

​@@GodlikeIridium allegedly hahaha

[@jonhelmer8591]

It's the little plastic trucks that make it so watchable.

[@rodchallis8031]

Discovering an old topographical map series from surveys done in my area around 1910 shows how a lot of small creeks and streams have been diverted, or eliminated because the land they once drained has been substantially changed. While we look at the main river, I wonder what models that included a before and after of this process would tell us. Another factor isn't what we've added to streams and rivers, but what we took away-- the beaver.

[@TippyHippy]

I put my hamster in a sock and slammed it against the furniture

[@leandersearle5094]

@@TippyHippy Here we see an example of the types of well-adjusted people you can find in a comment section.

[@DamienDarkside]

@@TippyHippy You didn't, but here's the attention you wanted. If you're going to try and shock people, try something that has a bit more effort than what I would write on /b/ when I was 14.

[@munkymittens]

Yeah imo every single problem we encounter in regards to this as humans , is we always forget to mimic nature but instead act as if we are the smartest thing on the planet. Everything from Farming, irrigation to weed management nature has provided its own solutions we just need to either mimic these or work more closely with the thing itself

[@splendid696]

I am from a small city, which has a small river flowing through it and I remember from my childhood when either fishermen or city council was actually digging up the river where the sediments would collect (keeping it in mind that the river emerges from a lake and has a dam in it's path). This way the stream was decent through out the seasons. Now, as they have stopped doing so and the dam has been privatized, the flow of the stream has been drastically reduced, fish are almost non-existent and the stream feels super slow. I feel like that if they had continued with the sediment removal, the river would stay in it's path and yet fed the surroundings with it's goods.

[@woIf]

What they should do is remove the dam. What you're describing is a heavily degraded stream. Manually removing sediment is the equivalent of getting liposuction once a month instead of reducing your hamburger intake from 25 a day to 0. The only way to restore the health of a river is to undam it and restore its natural path, which has often been straightened artificially. Anything else is a desperate, delusional attempt to ignore fact.

[@samgarrard2222]

I’m a student in Civil Engineering and your videos are awesome! Restoring some of our natural rivers is something on which I hope to base my career, so this is so cool to see!

[@hetedeleambacht6608]

there is hope for the future

[@bunk95]

You didn’t confirm most things are designed with [price tag] in [mind] and leave? What will you end up marketed as?

[@emriver]

Thank you, Grady (& Wes!) for another excellent video! Your channel (+ book, too) and the work you put into it is such a valuable resource for understanding the complex world around us. We greatly appreciate the cameo of Steve, and are so glad to continue what he began. Hope you can come see us again sometime! 🙂🌊

[@siberx4]

Do you have a way to separate all the model sand/sediment colours after a run so they can be reused, or are they cheap enough that they're simply dumped and replaced with fresh? If you do separate them, how do you do it? I'd be fascinated to know!

[@emriver]

@@siberx4 Once the color-coded media is mixed in the stream table, there's not any real need to separate it out by color. It can be done with LOTS of sieving. Our media is expensive and meant to be reused ... well, forever really. It's thermoset plastic so doesn't degrade over time.

[@nope1904]

I'm a big fan!

[@emriver]

@@siberx4 The different grain sizes can be sieved for separation, but it's a lot of work and no discernable gain. Our media is expensive to make, so it's meant to last the life of the model.

[@JosiahGould]

I... I may have run into Steve DECADES ago here in Missouri as a kid. I remember a field trip somewhere and they had this absolutely amazing stream table, something I had never seen before. I was mesmerized by how the flow and erosion patterns worked. Now long after that presentation (which has stuck in my mind ever since) I've taught my children in Florida how to build landscaping that won't let their yard wash away and how to slow down running water to capture sediment. Deep memories here, my friend!

[@katherinepoulos4013]

Thank you Josiah. Steve would have loved to read what you wrote. He would say that he hoped that his stream tables would inspire children's curiosity in rivers, science, and conservation, such that when they were adults they would not do things that would cause harm. Katherine (Steve's wife)

[@taytayflyfly7291]

What sort of techniques would you teach for landscaping?

[@15thobserver]

Thats awesome

[@rustledjammies8769]

I love how you're at EmRiver doing these awesome videos. I came across their KZbin account a couple of years and love watching their streams. I've long wondered ever sicne I was a kid how one could model a river and if I had the funds and the space I would buy one of their kits!

[@icarus313]

4:29 I just wanted to say that this diagram is such a brilliant tool, thank you for including it! You took all my intuitions about weights and balances and effortlessly transferred them to an understanding of how factors related to silt and water flow affect the balance of erosion and deposition in rivers. That's so helpful I had to pause just to stare at it and fully take it in. Well done and great job with your videos, overall. You're a great teacher!

[@MrMrMoped]

As someone who is in the field of fluvial gemorphology since 15 years, good job! Lack of knowledge of river dynamics is still hurting many ecology and engineering projects. Engineers often struggle with the lack of an simple answer that you can slap a safety factor on. Also, in fluvial geomorph it can be hard to gauge whether you need one sheet of paper to solve a problem, or if you need a 5 year research program. So your education on the complexity of problems in the field is highly appreciated!

[@rachel_sj]

I showed this video to my spouse (along with others that he's made on geomorphology) who's a Hydrologist for our state (Minnesota). He's commenting on the video, mainly saying that Equilibrium is a myth, and others related to his Masters-level knowledge in geology/geomorphology, so I'm learning double the info at once! Not sure if I'm entertaining my spouse or annoying him by showing him these 😅

[@15thobserver]

Just curious, do you know of or have you studied Victor Schauberger work?

[@lobopix_]

​@@15thobserver Just what I was thinking but you beat me to it. The series of 5 well-illustrated books on Schauberger's work by Callum Coats is mind-blowing. A long while ago I saw a video of some Germans trying to control a river from flooding without creating the usual concrete banks which just pushes all the problems downstream. Instead they put three huge boulders in the river bend specifically according to Schauberger principles. Haven't seen an update on whether it was successful though. Recently I bought a copy of *Lo―TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism* (Julia Watson) which is something of a sister volume to *Architects Without Architecture* (Bernard Rudofsky). These books show what amazing sci-art works people can create by observing directly from nature. In Lo-TEK there are astonishing color photos of 'root bridges' which have to be seen to be believed. They are artistic chaos tamed enough over time to perform a necessary function. Because it takes half a lifetime or more for trees to grow training the roots to create a bridge took anticipatory planning and passing on that basic plan plus the constant shaping of the direction of the roots. It's a beautiful mess that blends right into the jungle around it and has obviously stood the test of time. There's also a chapter on the different ways people control water for irrigating terraced rice fields. It seems that a classroom based college education just can't match direct on the ground observations over time and working with nature and its local context. No wonder projects built from such an abstract education need to be undone, or get mangled by nature herself. That doc series looking at what happens to our human world when humans have died off shows just how much maintenance is required to keep our engineering works going which seize up in just 2 weeks without human intervention. Ho hum

[@weburnitatbothends]

The sooner engineers recognise trapezoidal channels aren't the answer for everything the better, long time coming.

[@15thobserver]

@@lobopix_ Didn't mean to leave you hanging, never got notified of your comment. Victor was a master at river work, an absolute master. That man absolutely outclassed us all when he figured out how to control a river with a few rocks, while we are STILL trying to concrete an entire man made canal to get the water to flow in the right direction. Thats really cool to find someone else familiar with his work. Have you watched the 2008 documentary 'Comprehend and Copy Nature'? I'm sure if you've read those books you'll be familiar with many of the things mentioned, but I still think its worth a watch. YES! School/university is 100 years behind people out in the real world innovating their way through. I have 2 degrees and I can confirm that everything I wanted to know was free to learn and had better examples to work from out of the classroom. I'll have to look in Lo-Tek, you have me very intrigued. Thank you so much for the suggestion.

[@jergarmar]

It's so good to see this channel increase in size and scope, allowing more involved setups like this, but I think it's even better to see how your ability to convey complex systems and ideas has increased along with it. This video is not just "an established channel visits a thing and talks to a guy," but instead uses this opportunity to SHOW and to aid understanding on a deeper level. My kids and I look forward to each new video. Amazing video, great channel, hope you can do this -- and have fun! -- for a long time.

[@Oskarsom]

Practical Engineering is low-key one of the best and the most important channels on KZbin. Glad it exists. Marvelous educational materials.

[@48956l]

Man I have such a huge respect for civil engineering after finding this channel. Thank you.

[@petergamache5368]

You've got to talk to your contractor about demobilizing equipment after they're done with a project. Those trucks are everywhere!

[@chrislora8895]

Several decades ago I worked with a stream table in my Environmental Geology class. I was fascinated to learn that a river has a job-to carry sediment! Even as an art history major, I thought this class should be required right alongside the core subjects because we are all impacted by, and we all impact, the environment. The more ordinary people understand nature, the more they can do (or do not!). Great video. Thank you!

[@oldfag_adventures]

it should but sadly it's not beneficial to our money grubbing capitalist overlords.

[@sumguy01]

Rest in peace Steven Gough. Your life’s work has had a positive impact on the whole world.

[@mctooch]

This basically was the most amazing demonstration ever. So many perfect visuals. Great work, Grady! 👏

[@gormster]

I actually first learned about the situation with the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya from xkcd of all places. He did a comic about it a while ago and then followed it up with a blog post about how close the structure was to failing.

[@ravn_blade]

The sad part is that it needs to fail for the Louisiana marshlands. They've repeatedly said "we loose acres of swampland everyday" when all the sediment that would be there is at the Mississippi Delta as it extends out another couple hundred feet into "The End of the World"

[@mbvoelker8448]

@@ravn_blade Right. Nature should have been allowed to take it course. Had we accepted it and built new port facilities instead of expensive and doomed control structures we'd have saved both lives and money.

[@J.C...]

Hatguy?

[@J.C...]

​@@mbvoelker8448 we? You live in South Louisiana?

[@mbvoelker8448]

@@J.C... We -- Americans as a whole. I don't have to live there to be concerned about the lives that will be lost and the general devastation that will come when the river eventually makes the jump that cannot be denied forever. :)

[@gtv6chuck]

In college I took a geomorphology course taught by one of the great experts, Stanley Schumm. In the end the major conclusion was that whenever you interfere with the physics of rivers you generally do more harm than good. Your video and models show this, and thankfully engineers have learned this.

[@gtv6chuck]

@@karlwithak1835 Yes, it will be a homeless Mecca. The river channel in my town is infested.

[@mbox314]

The sun will consume the earth and destroy the entire earth, so don't bother with anything.

[@tonymorris4335]

@Karl with a K I love how you want to blame geologists and not the issues creating homeless populations.

[@jakelandry5645]

You do an amazing job explaining subject matter in your videos. Thanks for the attention to detail!

[@buckstop]

If you ever study Chinese history one reoccurring theme is how much effort is put into maintaining the Yangtze River. It's yellow from all the sediment it carries which is amazing for farmland along but means that the river will move over time as sediment builds up around curves. The dynasty at the time will create banks and walls around the river but this is like smothering a flame with barrels of gunpowder. It may work but the more you do it the worse its eventual outcome will be. Pretty much every time that river has a major flood it destroys all the farmland, causes a massive famine, and the current dynasty is disposed for a new one.

[@Jacob-yg7lz]

11:00 Pretty much all of Louisiana is a delta, which is why the creation of the Old River Control Structure has actually caused the Louisiana coast to shrink massively

[@MrDocSeus]

I work for a municipality in the Stormwater department. This video is awesome and so packed with good info people need to know. We built a stream table into a big trailer and take it to schools and to events and both kids and adults learn so much from it (and have fun with it). When we set it up, we make one straight channel, and one curvy one that also has aquarium plants along the banks. It works great! We also have done some stream restorations on public lands.

[@mattesdrescher4783]

This is so interesting to me because I’m still deciding wether or not to go into fluvial geomorphology in my studies and you just made it that more appetizing to me ❤

[@heatherguill9614]

Amazing video! I’ve been fascinated by this topic since college, when I studied Environmental Studies. I’m so glad to see that we are finally learning from our mistakes in this regard.

[@glennpearson9348]

Living in Virginia and having family is Texas gives me an opportunity to regularly survey the mighty Mississippi River from 35,000 feet on a fairly regular basis. It's hard to appreciate just how often the river's thalweg moves until you see the hundreds of oxbows that have formed over the years from above. Great video, Grady. Hopefully, you had some fun just making mud pies, too!

[@emriver]

Bonus points for use of 'thalweg' 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

[@scottamori3188]

I’m not an engineer. I left the modeling and math world decades ago. BUT this video and the river modeling table is one of the most fascinating demonstration devices I can ever recall seeing. Great video!

[@Iain1957]

Grady, when I was doing my Environmental Science Masters (Monash University in Australia) I did a course called Environmental Geomorphology 2 which consisted of a series of case studies and field trips to varying engineering disasters caused by engineers ignoring basic principles. The high point being the Koo Wee Rup Swamp project where a large swamp was drained to make farmland by straitening the river, which caused rapid erosion undermining all the engineering structures, dumped the sediment into the adjoining bay destroying all the sea grass and the fish stocks. The swamps thus drained promptly caught on fire and the only water available was sea water which put out the fire but damaged the land....It was a true learning experience.

[@TedApelt]

I am in the Florida Native Plant Society, and you brought up many things we are talking to people about. Good job!

[@RhoOphiuchi]

I remember using a stream table in my high school geology class in the early 70's. The impact of watching moving water and how it carves out it's channels has stayed with me over the decades much better than the pictures in the textbook ever could.

[@atimholt]

One of my favorite childhood memories was on a vacation to a beach with runoff coming out of a pipe. The flow was slow enough for us to dam it up as much as we wanted, or to let it release and cut channels.

[@preetidevi3969]

I love how you're at EmRiver doing these awesome videos.👍

[@RandyK1ng]

Yet another fabulous video. Thanks, Grady - it's really awesome to see these things that you bring to light. And I love the work at Emriver - who could not love coming to work everyday with your lunch pail and a sand pail with googly eyes? They get to play in the dirt all day. :)

[@DSlyde]

Those tables are legitimately amazing at demonstrating the concepts. They've made this series much more intuitive.

[@kevinhoober1863]

The production level of the stuff shot at emriver is amazing. Love the attention to detail in having the stream run while you deliver directly to camera (you did a great job, too). Dialog in those clips is by far the cleanest of the entire video (you might try moving the mic closer for your voice over work--simple signal/noise equation there). Been watching for a long time--keep up the good work!

[@CYI3ERPUNK]

another +1 for Emriver and everything they have been doing for decades now ; great video ; such an interesting model , very visually enlightening =]

[@benreber2277]

That model is awesome. As a landowner it has changed my view and one of my future plans I have on fixing my land. I have heavy erosion and drainage issues. Original plan was to cut drainage lines and burry pipes and stone to control water movement but this model told me it will be to fast water movement so I’m going to redraw my plans to allow for water to slow down in natural low spots before washing into the pond depositing too much dirt.

[@unvexis]

I recently hiked the trail along the Elwha River in northwestern Washington state to the area where the Glines Canyon Dam was demolished in 2014. In the 9 years since, the Elwha has dramatically changed, returning to something more like its natural form, and along with its delta, the nearby coast, and Ediz Hook, it would serve as a good real-world example of many hydrological topics discussed in your recent videos.

[@ZepG]

Great video! I've been a CADD tech in the US for over 23 years and 90% of my work has been involved in stream mitigation, relocation, and restoration. It always has amazed me how much power a stream or river is capable of, even with the best designed control structures I've seen giant cross rock vane boulders being blown away by a freak flood lol.

[@robertmusil1107]

Man. this is one of the best educational videos I've watched on a topic. Congrats.

[@michaelschroeder937]

Really enjoyed the video and the sandbox. The Beach Scour is underrated and can be a very big problem. I was watching an old presentation on Duluth, MN where MN point is getting washed away by beach scour. Two probable causes are the dams upstream and the piers for the canals block the movement of sediment and prevent it from being deposited on MN point.

[@DoubLL]

Very interesting! I would love to see a deep dive into specific methods of working with rivers, even on a small scale, such as a city fortifying the sides of a river with stones or something similar to protect infrastructure and housing built close to the river. I'd love to know how effective such measures are in the long term and what kind of effects they may have on the river as a whole.

[@raffriff42]

The Thames would be a good study - it's been extensively embanked (or leveed, as we Americans would say) beginning in Roman times. And Old London Bridge (1209-1831) had so many piers in the river that rapids were created at max tidal flow.

[@IstasPumaNevada]

I'd like this too.

[@whoever6458]

They did that to our local wash and saved an old house that we were all sure would fall into the water eventually. They left the bottom of the river dirt, dug it deeper, and reinforced the sides with concrete where it's extremely close to structures but much of the rest of it that is still close enough to buildings has a bunch of big rocks and smaller ones to fill in the gaps that protect the sides. Then, they put in these small dams that are maybe a quarter of the height of the channel itself and have some kind of culvert that whirlpools water from the upper section down and under the dam to the lower section when it's just normal flow. The dam itself is made of big rocks concreted together with a section that is a little bit lower than the rest in cases of a little flooding. Then, if it's a big flash flood or something, the water can go over the top of the entire dam without getting too close to the top of the channel. This seems to slow the water down and it definitely ends up dumping a bunch of sediment out behind each one of these little dams that they take out with bulldozers. When the wash gets into the city, they have it all cemented out but it isn't for a very large distance and there are buildings really close to the wash there. I think this ends up working, though, because of what they've done further up stream as I've described above. Even further up stream than all of that, it's pretty much rural and so they have left it natural and there's even a nice exercise trail next to it that I'm going to hike in a little bit today actually. For the transition from the completely natural channel to the parts they modified a bit, they've made a nice, sloping waterfall out of big rocks and concrete kind of like the short dams they have every few thousand feet downstream but all the water flows over this feature because there's no culvert going under it like there is for the little dams. It makes for a fine place to go wading and see all kinds of interesting animals and plants, which is often why I go there as a biologist. I think the idea is that you want to get the water to slow down but you also want to give it a way to rush quickly towards the sea in the event of a huge flash flood. At the same time, you want it to soak into the ground as much as possible, especially in places like where I am because we often get droughts and so we need all the ground water we can get. Oh and those little dams create a good habitat for water birds and various amphibians, which I always see when I go hiking there. I haven't seen in any fish but a few decades ago, this wash didn't have water in it year round so it makes sense that there wouldn't be any fish in there. Maybe there will be eventually or maybe there are some that I just haven't seen yet, but I've waded for miles in the wash and haven't seen one fish. I did see a turtle a couple of months ago and I regularly hear and sometimes see donkeys, coyotes, and wild boars down there.

[@dannypomeroy9255]

Madison Wisconsin pbs wensday night at the Lab they done massive studies in rivers and lakes in why doesn't concrete work or stones on bankments it's pretty interesting in there findings all that money spent on shorelines that all failed they found out the hard way to try to stop the erosion on lakes or rivers the mighty Mississippi is totally aways changing with in the pools are the biggest changes the river main channel is all govern by dams n spillway in back waters and yes above the dams them back water pools are slowly filling in ware there's water flowing in back waters over concrete spillway the pool above dam n spillway slowly fill in creating islands and large sand bars and the Army core engineers are constantly battling the river to keep a 12ft main channel open there dredging sediment 75 percent of time pumping millions of ton of sand so barges can navigate channel the massive rain falls we got six yrs ago has really damaged alot of shoe lines it wiped out over 75 percent of plants along river Bank on main channel it still to this day fighting to grow vegetation yet and now the state of Minnesota has a 3 yr study in why the river oxygen levels have dropped so low fish are dying yes you reading it right very low Oxygen levels on the Mississippi River that all side affects in loses to all that vegetation......

[@pendlera2959]

@@dannypomeroy9255 I don't mean this in a rude way, but it's really hard to read what you wrote without any punctuation and with such long meandering sentences.

[@Dr_Kenneth_Noisewater]

Speaking of culverted rivers…In the UK there are some rivers that haven’t been seen in centuries because they start and end in culverts. One youtuber, a Manchester resident called Martin Zero, has documented quite a few such rivers in and around Manchester. The River Tib and Shooter’s Brook being two examples. He has even found ways to locate these mostly unmapped lost rivers that run deep under his city. Here’s the viral video that started me down the rabbit hole: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hYvIiZZ-ac2gqrs

[@statementleaver8095]

Suez canal built by English Engineers River Thames built by English Engineers Masters of Water Displacement America = Too much Concrete NOT enough Clay = Masters of Drought

[@Skinflaps_Meatslapper]

@@statementleaver8095 Wow look at all the irrelevant things you put together well done

[@TheWinjin]

Both are also mentioned in an excellent series "Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch and it's completely unrelated but I just wanted to share it.

[@user-nh3xq7rh2m]

Thanks Grandy. I get why you do this but for all the rest of us I’m so appreciative. It makes much a difference. What an opportunity to learn. Thank you!

[@AmarothEng]

That model was phenomenal for the presentation.

[@ironash20]

I learned long ago growing up in the country that you don't try to control nature, you work with it. Even today when I design things for my home I ask "what will nature do?" and work with that. Even if you do control it, it will probably be short lived.

[@deedieducati2272]

Exactly! And rivers are VERY POWERFUL....

[@amentco8445]

And when you "control" it, you destroy it.

[@carolineregalado4900]

Last year when I visited Louisiana for the first time, I *had* to go visit Old River. My friends were all very confused why I wanted to drive several hours to see a flood gate. They didn’t seem much more enthused when I explained it was THE flood gate. I also visited and drove the length of Bayou LaFourche, the Mississippi’s most recently abandoned channel, to see the other end of the life cycle. Fluvial morphodynamics is one of the most fascinating fields of study, and it’s one that’s still far from matured. I can’t wait to see all the stuff we learn from all these new restoration endeavors.

[@tylerhernandez5978]

I'm a lifelong Louisianian who is fascinated by fluvial morphodynamics, maybe life has forced that upon us here 😅, but I have never seen the Old River Control Structure in person, nor have I travelled the entire length Bayou Lafourche, you're inspiring me to go check them out! I hope you got to see a lot of the infrastructure here in New Orleans as well! ⚜

[@FamilyManMoving]

Bet you're the hit of the party. ;) Truthfully, we'd get along great. I do the same kind of stuff, and eventually learned it was more fun to do some of it alone. Then I had kids, and turned them into nerds. Try it. Works wonders.

[@carolineregalado4900]

@@FamilyManMoving Way ahead of you there. My seven-year-old already solves Rubik’s cubes for fun.

[@FamilyManMoving]

@@carolineregalado4900 Awesome! Wait till they learn microcontrollers and want to weaponize old dishwashers. Good times.

[@scottjallen2]

Thanks so much for your videos! Absolutely the coolest way to learn this stuff.

[@vrixphillips]

my fifth grade teacher had a makeshift river-in-a-box except it didn't "run" so we had to pour it ourselves to do tests. It was really neat! That was in elementary school in Georgia. I'd never seen the Mississippi River. Then I went to a Louisiana University online and I would work on a coastal project which talked about oil and the coast. I'm now at LSU getting my doctorate [in comparative literature] and they're worried about the silt in the delta... whether it's too much or too little, I can't remember. Same back home with Savannah!

[@paulrossmann7690]

One of my favorite concepts from Practical Engineering.

[@bigp1158]

One of your best videos yet!!! Love it! My preschool had a much simpler water table. I'm 41 and still wish I could go in there and play with it. Awesome video and I know you must have had a blast!

[@Miamcoline]

Absolutely incredibly helpful, interesting and compelling video! Who knew that river management could be so interesting. Thank you so much for this! These kinds of videos can make a completely outmeasured impact. Great plug too. One day, Brilliant and approaches like it, will make a big difference with the general public.

[@VeNoM0619]

4:18 I don't know why, but that diagram just blew my mind. It seems like such a headache to try to balance that thing. What a good demonstration of the issue though.

[@dennis2376]

This has been very informative series, even if comprehending it is a challenge. :) Thank you and thanks to the team that made it happen. Have a wonderful week.

[@robertroberts5218]

Sulphur River, here in Hunt County, TX, was straightened out from about SH 224 on to Jim Chapman Lake. A few curves but deep and wide and a great place to go hunting fossils and arrowheads because of the erosion and deposition. A flood control tragedy. Every bridge pile is greatly scoured. Thank you for your videos and the dedication to us.

[@TimmyT1234]

This was an amazing video - rarely is something this insightful and accessible 🙂

[@tkskagen]

Congratulations on making an "Engineering Channel" that is not boring Mr. Grady! I used to (before my career ending Spinal injury), be a State Certified Environmental Engineer. The way that you explain the "principles of erosion" and soil composition are very easy to follow and understand, as if I was explaining to my 15yo child... More "earthen builds" such as Retaining walls and city streets would be a great addition to your library. Thanks again, T Western Washington State

[@ArtamisBot]

I always love watching you play with all these awesome dioramas 💚

[@thebalaa]

So interesting! Love your videos thanks

[@enriquelichtenstein6675]

This was excellent! More like this please!

[@dlinkster]

This is one of my favorite series on the is channel. I absolutely love the content here.

[@mwmentor]

Thanks for a fascinating video Grady - fluvial geomorphology is really interesting, one of the reasons being that the Emriver team have made it so visual and a great way to test ideas and see the consequences in an accelerated test environment. Hats off to both you and them for the exceptional work that you do in highlighting issues and the solutions and benefits that engineering can offer to solving them... 👍😄

[@rat_mortuis]

Seeing the rebuilt Boscastle Bridge appear in this video was a shock. I was in the village the day it hit and saw the devastation first hand. Returned a year later to a rebuilding village and several times afterwards. One of my happy places.

[@adtsiriusstarr112]

studied river morphodynamics during my postgrad, i like your sediment-discharge balance analogy very much. very useful for educational purposes to public audiences

[@Kathend15]

Grady your videos never cease to impress. Thanks for all the work you do!

[@718Insomniac]

I feel like I could study under you, with how well you explain and convey information.

[@Cristian-gj7fg]

Really good explanation. Love the models.

[@commoncitizen03]

Gratitude for this excellent tutorial of a rather complex problem 🎉

[@eustatic3832]

Please visit LSU River Science Center, it's a whole room sized sediment table!

[@tdumnxy]

How many viewers are dismantling & putting away their model train layouts, to install river tables? I want one. Good job Grady.

[@JoshuaFletcher]

Glad I've found your channel. Watched a few vids now and getting my kids to watch these too. Much obliged.

[@Thenanafarmher]

So much intriguing information! I had no idea of the Mississippi River distributary !

[@ViviFuchs]

I love how the river table appears to have different-colored grains for each diameter. I assume it's to make it easier to see at a glance how flow and gradient affects deposition.

[@jimbrown5091]

I used to live in Rock Island, IL. The lock and dam system on the Mississippi river has drastically changed it from the river Mark Twain once knew.

[@Blueskies309]

You should do a follow up video to this. The Mississippi River is close to setting a new low record. It is getting hard to move product up and down.

[@Gren4te]

Can you make a vid about that rivertable alone? Mist be a lot of science behind the sediment types used. Really interesting to see how water works. The dutch have a lot of knowledge about how water works due to their location (the whole of the netherlands is basically a river delta) but there is still a lot that we just don’t grasp yet. A tiny change to a river somewhere in Germany can have HUGE consequences for us.

[@skayt35]

German here, so by no means waterway masters like the Dutch. Yet since the 1990s we understand that re-establishing flood plains of the Upper Rhine is essential for preventing its flood runoff peak from coinciding with the flood runoff peaks of tributary rivers further downstream, a main cause of severe flooding of the Middle and Lower Rhine and downstream Dutch waterways. It took some years for the German federal government, affected German states as well as France to draw up and agree on the Integrated Rhine Program. Progress on the related projects is slow, not least because of resistance in directly affected rural areas. A few projects have been implemented successfully, but many more still are in a protracted planning phase. Let's hope that the contentious issues get resolved soon.

[@Gren4te]

@@skayt35 yes. Unfortunately we saw the devastating effects those combined events can have two years ago.

[@TheJoeHindy]

If this channel existed when I was a teenager I would've gone into engineering so hard. This stuff is so cool.

[@torkakarshiro5170]

I just thought the same. The older I get the more I am convinced that engineering would have been a good job for me, but my parents probably would not have approved it.

[@kingBing101]

You still can

[@torkakarshiro5170]

@@kingBing101 I am 40. If I quit my job NOW by going to University again I still would not get a job later because I would be 45+ and would have nearly no experience in the new field. Where I work now I am widely respected and quite good and it is a quite safe job. Sometimes you just reach an age where extreme changes do not make things better.

[@GarrettCarr916]

This is such a well made video. It's a great learning resource

[@hudortunnel9784]

this is so true. you never mess with riverways. i remember during the series of earthquakes in the Philippines, a 3-story building seemed swallowed by the earth. initially, it was thought that it was built on a faultline, but later it was rediscovered that the land was previously a river bed which caved in during the series of earthquakes.

[@marthabenner6528]

You can see many of these problems around our small town. It's fascinating being able to understand them now.

[@NikasGamer]

Grady, the effort you put into these videos, and the demos within them, is unbelievable. Next level stuff. Blows my mind each time! We love you

[@user-wc9vy4oc5h]

That topic is very interesting. Interesting case's of rivers changed by engineers are almost every river and the zuiderzee in the Netherlands. The Delta work's and the land reclamation are some of the greatest achievements in hydraulic engineering. But the river that was changed most severely by engineers is probably the Emscher River in Germany. It flows through the densely populated Ruhr valley, that was known for underground coal mining in the previous one and a half centuries. Because of the extensive mining operations in the 1900s the ground started sinking severely and the river flooded the area often. The problem was that the old entry of the Emscher in the River Rhine is at an higher elevation at some of the areas upstream. This would mean that the citys would be flooded and turned in to a lake. Another problem was that it was impossible back then to construct a sewage system because of the instable soil in the densely populated area. The solution was back then to divert the river further north and to construct a manmade elevated riverbed with dikes. Furthermore pumps are necessary to elevate many rivers that flows into the Emscher. Without these pumps the whole area would flood. The whole new artificial riverbed was made out of concrete and the sewage of several cities was discharged untreated in the river. The river was basically turned into an sewer on the surface, because it was impossible to build them underground. Before the entry in the River Rhine they built a big sewage treatment plant and the whole river literally flew in and out of it. Since the beginning of this century most of the coal mines closed and they started to recultivate the area. Hydraulic engineers started to build huge sewage pipelines, treatment plants and pump stations parallel to the river. If it was possible the concrete riverbed was removed and widend. Furthermore the river was diverted again even further north so it can flow freely. Since roughly 5 years the river is clean now. The old river treatment plant is now connected with pipelines

[@hetedeleambacht6608]

wow what a (his)tory

[@peterszar]

You and those working models, always a pleaser watching them, this one was awesome, take it easy.

[@jt92]

Seeing Grady play around this model all giddy is just bliss. I can only imagine this is what Sheldon would look like if he got to play with a huge trainset model.