Congratulations to the editors for publishing the opinion pieces, Much Ado About Dams (Water Journal, March 2011, page 14). I rise to their challenge to comment and, with luck, others will too. My favourite subject back in 1974 was dam design. I became an engineer after watching flood mitigation works on the Clarence River in the 1960s. But over the years my ideas have changed drastically. Think about a river. It runs even when it is not raining because the water is coming out of the surrounding sponge - the land. It is this "sponge" concept that we have lost. Time of concentration has been reduced sometimes by an order of magnitude. We understand the system as a drain, not a sponge. The sponge absorbs water from rain, from floods and from the rivers themselves. This sponge nurtures the river. When it comes to a drought, our vegetation has learned to survive until the rains come again.
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