A wonderful story about a man and his family who have moved from half way around the world to Sacramento to help us solve our water problems.
An excerpt.
Portrait: Testing the waters
Shyamal Chowdhury wants others to understand the area's flood risks
By Bob Sylva -- Bee Columnist Published 12:01 am PDT Sunday, August 6, 2006
Shyamal Chowdhury is Bangladeshi. As a boy, thirsting for knowledge of the West, he read Time and Life magazines by the glow of a hurricane lamp. No doubt a common faucet would have left him spellbound.
Then, and now, water flows in his veins.
Chowdhury's destiny was to be a water engineer. Every day, he sits in front of a computer terminal. He stages flood models, enacts disaster scenarios -- a breached levee, a tidal wave -- and calculates flood- risk assessments. His is a perilous hypothetical.
"People have a false sense of security," says Chowdhury of current flood safety measures. "These levees can break. These dams can fail. We need to build and reconstruct in such a way that we can avert future disasters." Not a drop of this is academic to him.
Bangladesh is at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal. It has one of the world's largest deltas, which is fed by two of the subcontinent's most powerful and sacred rivers, the Ganges, which carries a dirgeful stream of human ash, and the Brahmaputra, which is invigorated by snowmelt from the Himalayas.
This is the monsoon season. A time when the parched soil of Bangladesh is refreshed and innundated by torrential rains. In 1970, a cyclone drowned 500,000 people in what was then East Pakistan. In 1991, another cyclone killed 140,000 people, leaving 10 million more homeless. To be Bangladeshi is to know in your heart the creative- destructive paradox of water.
Now, on a late afternoon, Shyamal Chowdhury is sitting in a conference room at his office. He works for Wood Rogers, an engineering firm located in Cannery Park off C Street. Much of this city, like all of Bangladesh, is just a bump above sea level.
