Customer Reviews

Restoring Streams in Cities: A Guide for Planners, Policymakers, and Citizens

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This unique book is a comprehensive and detailed guide to how to go about restoring streams that have been degraded by channelization, excessive erosion or sedimentation, and undergrounding into storm drains. It covers everything from how to form Friends groups and develop public support through engineering and design choices. As an educated citizen without specialized training in engineering, I found it highly readable; the concepts are presented thoroughly but without excessive jargon. The author is a cofounder of the Urban Creeks Council of California and the Coalition to Rescue Urban Waters.

This book does an adequate job of generally presenting information in non-technical fashion for planners, policy makers, and citizens as related to stream restoration in cities. It is simplistic and fairly straight-forward reading for the layman interested in this topic.

On page 128, there is a diagram showing "factors influencing stream erosion and sedimentation" which appears to be attributed to Mr. E W Lane in an American Society of Civil Engineers professional journal dated 1955. However, a closer inspection of this particular journal article by interested readers should reveal to them that the figure shown in Riley's book in reality doesn't actually appear in the journal itself; although the diagram's concepts themselves are given in the journal article. So the question remains, WHO ACTUALLY DREW THE DIAGRAM in Riley's book and WHY WEREN'T THEY PROPERLY RECOGNIZED IN IT?

And HOW MANY OTHER MIS-LEADING OVERSIGHTS are possibly contained in the book?

From a hydraulic and hydrologic technical and design stand-point, this book appears weak and I feel that citation problems like I previously mentioned are inexcusable and not acceptable for a published book.

Thus my average rating of it.