The TV in the lounge blares, "Evacuations are underway in downtown. A huge mudslide has closed highway 20. If you are driving please avoid the following areas..." I'm writing this in a restaurant at the Portland Airport. Outside it is raining hard, really hard. The Willamette River is way over flood stage, about to exceed the December, 1964 stage, and it's still rising fast. Wow! Soon I'll board a plane for northern California and I feel regret to be leaving the action, though I need to get home while the getting is still good. Good-bye dear flood.

OK, I'll admit it , I love floods. Most hydrologists do and quietly yearn for the next really big one. I hope we have compassion for the human losses, but the overriding emotion is one of exhilaration. We feel connected to this version of natures fury. We know what floods do. We're adept at seeing the evidence of past floods, even those that happened decades or centuries ago. But a really large flood might only happen only once during our career, if we are lucky. Like death, we don't know when it will come, but we know it will. And it'll be over in a flash. We want to see it, in the flesh, in the raw. We want that fresh evidence, the kind that the really big floods leave everywhere. Overnight it's all changed, including the way people perceive watershed process and the need to care for our watershed infrastructure.

The TV newscaster is nearly shouting now, "Downtown Portland may need to be evacuated. The Willamette is about to crest over the seaweall. Highway 5 is closed". Gadzooks. The mind reels, thinking of all that bedload moving, big boulders rolling, stream bottoms utterly changing, landslides popping all over. The land itself is flowing, not just the water.

A wise old hydrologist one opined that droughts are better for the profession than floods, because "they last much longer" and thus penetrate deeper into the public psyche. OK, but to quicken my pulse and make me appreciate what I've learned, gimme a flood anyday. You too?

We learn a lot from floods. We find out how good our assumptions and predictions were. We learn what values are lost when the watershed volume gets turned up to 10, and how such disturbances shape ecosystems. The Mississippi floods taught us a lot about levees, among other things. What will we learn from this one?

A landowner recently asked me, after a 5-year flood wiped out his roads, "How can you plan for something like that?" I was so flabbergasted by his comment I could hardly answer. We ought to plan for big events, not just 5-year or 25-year, but the really big ones. We should not suffer from temporal myopia because our lives and careers are so short relative to the processes that shape the land. Big floods are part of the picture, even though some of us 'youngsters' might never have seen and understood really big floodwaters and their consequences.

The great PNW flood of '96 follows hot on the heels of the recent large "100-year" floods in central California, and the Southwest. What are we learning from these? Let's find the lessons, all of them, and conserve them. Let's be sure to remember, collectively, what we learn, and pass it on. How can we conserve what we learn? How about a clearing house for "Lessons from large recent floods in the west." This might be a useful thing to mount on a World Wide Web site? Speaking of which...

The WMC is now on the "Net". We have our own Web site. It's hosted on a server that the Council owns, located in Founder's Hall at Humboldt State University. A partnership agreement between the Council and the HSU Department of Geology allows us to have a dedicated Internet connection provided by the University, while the Geology Department uses the server for their Website. Geology professor Andre Lehré and I jointly manage the system. You can find it at http://watershed.org. Check it out. And please send me your ideas and contributions so we can build this nascent system into something that has enduring utility toward advancing the art and science of watershed management. Not online yet? Here's yet another reason to get an account and get connected. (See Net Drainage for more reasons).

Whooyaa! It's still raining... - Ed.