I am working with a program called HEC-RAS. It is the hydraulic modeling software that is used to map the 100-year floodplain. If any of you pay flood insurance you know what I’m talking about.

HEC-RAS was developed to take the place of HEC-2. HEC-2 is probably what the 100-year floodplain near you was modeled in. Unless your models have been updated recently. HEC-2 was born in the age of punch cards. The various data input parameters are still called “cards”. It was also born in the age of dot matrix printers and giant mainframe computers. The outputs that we work with (now on microfilm) were all printed out on 81/2×11 paper, portrait style. Some of the scanned copies even have the dark and light banding you would expect from the old green and white paper they used.

HEC-RAS is now a slick windows GUI program, but it still looks like its distant cousin HEC-2 in one respect: the output reports.

See here:

It produces pages and pages and pages and pages of data. Here is a text file output so you can see what I mean.

Because the report generates so much paper and what not, we try to limit the report or to take only the important parts, but sometimes we have to print out the entire thing.

The engineers who developed HEC-RAS apparently understand that their program produces so much paper. In fact, they even found a way to be humorous about the whole thing.

I know this because when you tell HEC-RAS to generate a report a little status bar comes up with an image of a tree in the right corner. As the report is generated, the tree is cut down. I took some screen shots of it:

Generate a report, kill a tree!

Who says engineers don’t have a sense of humor?