🧰The Hydraulic Toy Box
Everything I’ve built that moves water. The tools I point at real streams, the labs where I play with it, and the stories it all came out of.
The tools
free · runs in your browser · check every numberSnapBasin
Click a point on the map. It snaps to the stream, delineates the drainage basin against USGS StreamStats, cross-references published FEMA FIS flows, flags upstream dams from the NID, and reports the best published or estimated flow at that point.
snapbasin.com → 📏Tool · FEMA drainage-area transferFIS Flow Transfer
Paste a FEMA Summary of Discharges table, type your site’s drainage area, and get all eight flows, 2- to 500-year. Every number it made is colour-coded, and every printed value that falls off its stream’s line gets flagged. SnapBasin gives you the area; this takes it from there.
the-network-empowering-tomorrow.net/Watershed Pulse
Live federal water data for the Tennessee River main stem and its major tributaries. Click a pin for streamflow gages, water-quality monitoring, mussel critical habitat, upstream traces and pollution sources.
watershedpulse.com → 🦆Tool · will it hold water?DuckBasin Pulse
Click a point on your land and find out whether it could hold water for ducks. It pulls NRCS soil drainage, NOAA Atlas 14 rainfall and nearby USGS streamgages, then gives a plain-English read on building a moist-soil unit or a flooded impoundment. A screening toy, not an engineering reference.
duckbasinpulse.com → 🌦️Tool · the rain, gradedForecast Receipts
Click a Tennessee county and see how often the federal forecast guidance was right, with rain checked against volunteer gauges instead of airports. Live NWS forecasts, airport observations and severe-weather links. No login.
receipts.FileFlip surface scale transform
Drop in a LandXML surface, apply or remove a combined scale factor, and see the before and after before you trust it. The triangulation never changes — only the points move. Runs entirely in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Heads up: it’s still a little bit off. I just haven’t gotten back to play with it yet.— Travis fileflip-scale.The labs
play with the water · Opathorlokan UniversityThe Horseshoe Vortex
The vortex that digs the hole around a bridge pier. Three pier shapes, three substrates, one flow — pier scour, the HEC-18 way.
opathorlokanuniversity.net/Lester’s Lab
Hydraulics, taught straight. Pump curves, system curves, operating points, Darcy-Weisbach head loss, series pumps against geology — with the Clarksville sinkhole cascade as the worked example.
opathorlokanuniversity.net/Ripple Tank Lab
Drop a pulse on the water, send waves through one slit or two, slow the wave with a shallow wedge, bounce it off a wall — and watch what Huygens, Snell and Young saw.
opathorlokanuniversity.net/The Coastal Wave Tank
Generate a wave train, drop a barrier island, plant a mangrove fringe, raise a house on piers — and watch defense in depth outperform any single feature.
opathorlokanuniversity.net/The Three Gauge Test
Three real USGS gauges around the Walters Dam powerhouse on the Pigeon River, four AI engines, one bluff. Can they report the gauges straight — and will they catch a surge-tower number pinned on the wrong source?
opathorlokanuniversity.net/The story
where the tools came from · THE NETThe Yellow Legal Pad
Every Lester Pearson story in one place, in reading order — the Surge Tower, the Toolbox, Region IV in Atlanta, The Label Shift, and Zero to One Hundred. A hydrologist, a legal pad, and five times a number didn’t sit right.
Lester Pearson is a fictional character — not a real licensed engineer.
the-network-empowering-tomorrow.net/The Crack No One Could See
A kayaker out looking for herons photographs a crack in a Mississippi River bridge — and years of routine inspections go on to miss it. A story about Good First Answer Syndrome: pattern-matching makes us efficient, and pattern-matching makes us blind.
Dramatized from the real 2021 closure — names changed.
the-network-empowering-tomorrow.net/