Talk:Drainage district

universality of drainage districts

Terminology may differ, but as far away in space and time as ancient China it has been seen to be essential for farmers to cooperate in managing a common asset (and, in case of flooding, a common liability). One of the prominent issues that may come under the consideration of some drainage districts is determination of land boundaries when the course of a river changes. One issue that made government essential in ancient China was the creation and maintenance of irrigation canals that drew water off from a river. The canals would not maintain themselves, and the farmers closest to the water source would take as much water as they could regardless of whether any water reached the most remote parts of the system of canals. There needed to be someone with the authority to apportion water rights and to enforce usage rules.

In much of the United States, particularly along larger rivers such as the Missouri, drainage districts are important parts of the farm economy. In these cases the primary concern is probably to manage storm water runoff so that soil erosion and flooding is minimized, and also to properly maintain dikes or levees. Avoiding log jams in creeks and rivers must be as important as making sure that the dikes will not fail during times of floods.

The article as it stand seems mostly to declare that drainage districts exist. Mention of three or four places in the U.S. might lead the reader to believe that there are no drainage districts in, e.g., Iowa.

Some attention needs to be given to the idea of a river basin, an area of ramiform streems that all feed through a common outlet to a larger body of water. A drainage district that only covered part of one such catchment area, or that covered parts of two or more catchment areas would be of little or no use. Everything that feeds into one outlet needs to be jointly governed or else there may be huge inefficiencies coupled with unequal distributions of work and/or taxes on one group of farmers.

Similarly, even though dike maintenance for some stretch along a major river may be the responsibility of the respective drainage district, if the districts upstream of any district do not maintain their dikes properly then those that do proper maintenance will not receive much if any benefit for their efforts. Therefore there must be an overarching supervisory authority to see to it that all dikes are properly maintained.

I'm drawing on decades-old memories of living in a little town on a giant river, so I can't give any neat bibliography. Discussions of 水利 shui-li, water benefits, go back to around the time of Confucius, but I can't think of any concise treatment of what they are and how they are managed.P0M (talk) 08:04, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

Probably this article should cross-reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujiangyan_irrigation_system P0M (talk) 08:11, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

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