a quick tour of the local flooding

As I discussed the recent monsoon-related flooding with my American coworker, I began to formulate a theory: the reason my coworker wasn't seeing any sort of flow along the Yangjae Creek was that the backup had started at the Han River and pushed its way uphill along the tributaries: first along the Tan Creek, which feeds into the Han; and next along the Yangjae Creek, which feeds into the Tan Creek. By that logic, things ought to look worse and worse the closer one got to the Han itself.

I did a reconnoiter last night, walking for 2.5 sweaty, sticky, humidity-filled hours along the still-walkable stretches of the creekside bike paths. A stretch of the Yangjae Creek has three levels' worth of parallel paths: street level, half-down-the-berm level, and creek level. As I discovered, the creek-level path along the Yangjae is totally submerged. See for yourself:

In the above photo, the staircase down to the creek level has been blocked off because it leads down to nothing but water. If you look way across to the other side of the creek, you can see a distant set of stairs that—for now, anyway—also leads down to nothing but water, so that side of the creek is submerged as well.

According to my theory, then, if it was this bad at the Yangjae, it ought to be even worse at the Tan Creek. I walked a couple miles down, past my apartment, and was surprised to see an un-submerged bike path alongside the Tan Creek:

This made me want to revise my theory: things didn't look all that bad along the Tan Creek, to be honest. I kept walking, though, and noticed that, as I paralleled the Tan, the downward ramps leading to the creekside level had all been blocked off. It soon became apparent as to why: the banks of the Tan really had been submerged, just not at the point where I'd caught my first glimpse of it. Sure enough, as I got closer to the Han River, things along the Tan Creek got significantly worse.

The shot below is blurry and hard to read, but what you're seeing, if you look carefully, is water that has overflowed to the point where some creekside benches sit under a bridge. I wanted to take photos of the flooding as I got closer to the Han, but the lighting was too poor to do so. Apologies for the shoddy picture quality.

Suffice it to say that, by the time I got to the end of the path and could go no farther, the downward-leading ramps all led to water. Everything in the area of the Yangjae/Tan confluence was under water. While I was tempted to take a risk and hop over a barrier to do some exploring, I decided to just let it go. I'm confident that the flooding will recede around mid-August, when this preternaturally long monsoon season will supposedly end. By October, assuming I have permission to do my walk, all flooding will have receded, and whatever sinkholes have appeared will have been fixed, more or less. I feel sorry for the trail-maintenance crews, who must be groaning in anticipation of the massive repair projects coming up once the water levels return to normal. Along the Yangjae Creek, the wooden stairs are poorly mounted on the sides of the miles-long berms that flank either side of the creek, so they're constantly being ripped out and rebuilt. No one wants to invest money in solid-stone steps with solid-stone foundations. Just like when wooden Buddhist temples burn down, it's easier to rebuild the staircases than to replace them with something solid and sturdy. Besides, the flimsy construction gives the work crews something to do, right?

Things are a mess right now, and what worries me most is the stretch of the Olympic Expressway, right next to the Han River, that has sat under water for some time. That's a prime candidate for collapse once the waters recede. Let's hope the Seoul government is proactive about assessing damage, intelligently diverting traffic, and making repairs.