Flood Warning by Katharine Kenah (review)

“Too much water in the wrong place is a flood”; with that succinct definition to shape the discussion, Kenah presents an overview of the many ways unwanted water insinuates itself into human activities and built environments, from the annoying to the deadly. The scientific concepts underpinning floods are easy for readers to follow—water flows from higher levels to lower ones; saturated ground causes runoff; runoff ultimately makes its way into streams and rivers and out to sea; turbulence enables water to carry solid materials and then deposit them when the flow abates. The settings and implications vary, though, and therein lay the exciting science tales—sloshy basements, flash floods, tsunamis, hurricane-driven rains. Kenah certainly wants her audience to take flooding seriously: “Six inches of rapidly moving water can knock you down. Two feet of rapidly moving water can float a bus and sweep away cars.” However, she stops short of alarmism and offers sensible precautions for families to take, regardless of their location, from the obvious advice to stay out of the water and move to higher ground if possible, to emergency kit essentials in case of evacuation or becoming stranded at home. Schimler-Safford’s mixed-media collages work equally well in large and small-scale portrayals of floods, mapping regional systems of water flow as clearly as capturing logs and garbage sweeping through an urban setting as police cordon off the area. Bold-type terms are defined in an appended glossary; two simple demonstrations of saturation and water’s transport power, as well as a trio of useful government websites, are also included.