Power as Affecting Flood Control

Power development and flood control are so often incompatible that, from the standpoint of power development, one more readily states the subject of this paper in the inverted order, namely, flood control as affecting power development. As a practical matter, consideration of power development in connection with flood control presupposes the use of reservoirs for such purposes. Some proponents of flood control conceive of benefits to power development as one of the economic justifications for control of floods by means of reservoirs. Proponents of water power development, on the other hand, are disposed to have misgivings whenever it is proposed to couple the use of storage capacity for flood control with that for power development. However, the two uses are not intrinsically, even if frequently, antagonistic, and it behooves one to analyze more deeply in order properly to appraise the effect of the one on the other.