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Flooding
message 151:
by
Clare
(new)
May 30, 2018 02:39AM
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A couple more people died, seems like people perish in every storm now. Also appears more likely people will be struck by a falling branch or tree than in the past.https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/31/us/alb...
Good explanation of sunny day flooding and why it isn't happening everywhere.https://e360.yale.edu/features/floodi...
This gets filed under weird. The storm dropped 4 to 7 inches over 7 hours. It created 60 sinkholes, though they didn't look deep, the ones in the roads destroyed the roads. The article also has a disclaimer, "The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM."IBM has been buying up various companies and concerns dedicated to monitoring weather conditions in order to sell weather data to the farmers and anyone else who wants to know what the weather is doing.
https://weather.com/news/news/2018-06...
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Limited articles so far, but whatever it is, there are 60 of them.Same area, but another feature of which is only the second time I have heard of it, a Meteotsunami, its when the water recedes from the shoreline because of the wind.
http://ux.freep.com/story/news/local/...
The first time I heard of one was around three weeks ago, the east coast storm that did so much damage. One of the storms spawned a few tornadoes farther north. That Meteotsunami was off the ocean coast, which meant the wind had to be blowing pretty hard to do that.
https://www.northjersey.com/story/wea...
Its getting harder to live on the coast. We probably shouldn't be building anything within a mile or two of the coasts anyway. A natural buffer will go a long way towards protecting the shoreland during severe weather, something man made structures can't do. Some of the articles mentioned that some mortgage and insurance companies were starting to re-examine sponsoring shoreline development. Build at your own risk would probably deter a lot development.https://www.upi.com/https:/www.upi.co...
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What people don't realize is the storms are three dimensional with may parameters for each dimension. Because the storms got larger in all three dimensions, the increase is not a simple linear percentage but a geometric expansion. The simple meaning of weather proof is going to change from being leak proof to damage proof. Another storm front, hard front line, not so bad what came after but another case of people being crushed in a car hit by a falling tree. Their injuries are serious. It was small car not SUV, keep wondering why SUVs don't do so good when hit by a tree or large branches.
The storm line was also blamed for a building collapse that injured a woman in Poughkeepsie. A larger, abandoned building partially collapsed after the rain stopped. The debris from that building landed on the roof of a good three story building next to it which collapsed part of the roof down to the first floor where the woman was trapped for 4 hours while they had to reinforce the building's structure to get the woman out of it.
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Photos show Michigan's U.P. devastation after flash flooding emergency
Noticed how the little trees did just fine while the road just disappeared, almost looks like crumpled paper.
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I was reading this book recently, it holds up the example from Japan of having disaster insurance in place for states, and firms ready to come in and fix everything in days.
Dull Disasters?: How planning ahead will make a difference
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And I am just at the part where, after repeated stops and starts of the North Atlantic Current, due to ice releases and freshwater releases from North America, the melting ice off North America's Laurentide Ice sheet has swollen the Atlantic to the effect that it spills over into the Mediterranean, instead of the other way around. Then the Med spills over into a large fresh lake at the point we now call the Dardanelles. This turns the fertile sheltered land into the Black Sea, the water rising fifteen centimetres, six inches, every day, never receding. For two years.
This drowning of villages, herds and farms is probably the origin of the Flood myth in many cultures. (With the extra moisture, far from the ice caps, there would have been extra rain.) Everyone had to up and leave, moving north into wooded territory. The villages are still there under a great depth of water.
The added Atlantic seawater also cut the land bridge between the British Isles and Europe.
When people tell you climate change has happened before, sea levels have changed before, this is the reality.
Are we coming to the day where the weather report for the day will be don't drive, it's raining today.With all the weather equipment connected in real time, we still can't stop an event once it starts getting out of control and issuing warnings for every storm is probably only going to bore people especially when the warnings don't pan out.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/sto...
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Thank-you for the update Clare.. It is hard to keep up with everything going on around this planet !
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People and resources have poured in from many countries, and today the word has been given that the boys will start to be brought out.
https://www.independent.ie/world-news...
While the monsoon is not new, I expect we are going to see more disasters, more unusual situations, more rescues and accomplishments over the coming years. People are coming into hazard situations which may not have existed, or the fact that there are more people now and they don't all need to work all day on the farm, means they can wander into floods unexpectedly.
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The monsoon comes every year, but the town isn't new.
Most of the reported deaths have been from people trapped in cars or houses.
https://www.independent.ie/world-news...
Clare, I haven't been at Goodreads, or from time to time would have commented on your flood watch.Naturally, we can't "blame" any single weather event on climate change, but the averages are going up, given more moisture in the air.
And yes, it's a tragedy, not only for humans but for other life as well.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/liv...
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Wishing you personally no floods, but please do add coverage if you come across any.
It's called global change and everything from politics to weather is changing. The time for debating who is to blame is over, it's now time to talk about how best to respond to the present situation we find ourselves in.In the past we were in relatively stable climate conditions so that we could plan on how to go about our lives without worrying about the weather. For all we know the size of 7 billion footprints all stomping at once stalled out a cooling period that was coming up.
But like you said there's more water in the air and it's increasing, not decreasing, and the average temperature has gone up a few degrees worldwide which is a phenomenal amount of energy all of which can only add up to bigger storms not smaller storms. So it would be a good idea to be aware of your environment. It's becoming painfully clear that sitting inside an SUV in a wind driven storm offers relatively little safety when the big branches start falling.
Because it's averages and not [yet] absolute values, some places will be warmer and some will be colder. Some drier, others wetter, some with highly impacted coastlines while others might even see gains. But it's not a flat line, for now it's an upward curve with perturbations. Worldwide, governments are already getting tired of helping people who get blind sided by the unruly storms because it keeps costing more and more money and nothing is solved by spending that money. And with 7 billion people, when something changes you can see the ramifications the very next day, unlike in the past where it took years for things to change so there was no reason to ever think about the consequences of actions.
The warmer temperatures and higher moisture levels have benefited micro life, giving that strata of life extra energy without doing any extra work to get it. Their increased population numbers are showing up everywhere. The transportation of everything distributes the microbes worldwide in a very short order of time.
The original Zika virus was essentially harmless 70 years ago when it was first identified in Africa and it was like catching a cold, no big deal. Traveling eastward for unknown reasons it took 69 years and 6 months for it to travel around the globe to the west coast of South America. By that time it had morphed into a more serious disease and was genetically different from the original African version. It then only took 6 months for the new version to travel through South America to the west coast of Africa. And now it sits quietly, doing relatively nothing, having redistributed itself around the globe, much the same way a new cell phone app would.
It's becoming fairly evident that if we continue to live business as usual lives we are more likely to run into some kind of trouble sooner rather than later. It just pays to keep our eyes open nowadays.
Nearly 2 million people in Japan are still being advised not to return home or to take extra precautions after flooding and mudslides. There are a lot of people living in vulnerable areas that are built up over the years. 100 people are thought to have died and 79 people are still missing despite comprehensive early warnings that are common in Japan.One of the articles said they got 3 feet of rain.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-we...
http://www.france24.com/en/20180709-j...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/japan-race...
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https://www.independent.ie/world-news...
Many retirement centres are on coastlines. If mass evacuation becomes required in the future, temporary or more or less permanent, provision will need to be made to have suitable facilities ready for people in wheelchairs and so on.
The property won't be worth selling and the people won't have their own transport, will need help moving everything. And they can't be dumped in prefabs in a desert, because they will need facilities like shops, pharmacies, doctors close at hand. Plus the move might make it harder for family to visit. Home helps will be needed, and they have to live somewhere too.
Governments are going to have to plan for this eventuality, and start now.
In the future people are contemplating the possibility of Category 6 or 7 hurricanes. I thought that they couldn't get faster winds or they would fly apart. Apparently not. One prediction about future hurricanes was that they would be moving slower than previous storms which does seem to be happening already.http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/flor...#
Clare wrote: "Thanks! here is one I found... when you see the photos of the rescued seniors, you realise how hard it has been for residents to escape. https://www.independent.ie/world-news...-..."
I agree.. Clear evidence of this was in some of the storms that hit the US last year and seniors were sitting in a few feet of water !
Robert wrote: "In the future people are contemplating the possibility of Category 6 or 7 hurricanes. I thought that they couldn't get faster winds or they would fly apart. Apparently not. One prediction about fut..."I guess the current upper theoritical maximum is about 190 mph.
https://www.livescience.com/32179-how...
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This is the only news story in weeks (at least in the U.S.) that made me smile. Can't begin to imagine the parents' relief!!!
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/cl...
I watched a animated digital presentation of the storm and resulting flooding and mudslides of Japan this week on NHK TV. At one point 2/3 of the island's rain detectors were high up in the red zone. At times the rain coming out of the sky was being fueled by moisture being blown out of the surrounding ocean's surface, instead of coming directly out of the clouds in the sky. In the upper elevations the water ran down hill until flooding and washing away even more dirt creating massive mudslides in many locations. Man has not created an infrastructure that will hold up against a large wall of mud.
It wasn't a particularly big storm as storms go. It was then that I realized that Japan and Bangladesh are looking at the same countdown clock when it comes to how much damage the rising waters can inflict on either one. Rising water levels coming up from below or rising waters coming down from above, it's all the same when one is boxed in and can't go anywhere to get out of the way. Which just goes to show having money isn't going to protect anyone in these changing times. Apparently an abundance of technology, education, and highly developed instincts on working the commercialized world isn't going to help either.
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Having money will help those with several homes around the world; the 0.1%. The rest of us are just going to have to cope.
Wetter than normal end for July for US east coast. Rainstorms that blanket US east coast usually move eastward into the Atlantic Ocean as they move in a northerly direction, pushing the rain fall out over the ocean. This particular line of storms is following the jet stream which is keeping the rain slightly inland. It is not expected to move off the coast for another day or two. Fortunately the rain has been sporadic though heavy at times. It is alleviating potential drought conditions for many locations. The problem with this weather pattern is that instead of distributing moderate rainfall over time it could stall just off the coast and use the unlimited moisture from the ocean to dump very heavy rainfall continuously along the entire coast for a couple of days.
The southern point of origin of the rain seems to resemble the bubbles streaming off a defect in a glass of a carbonated beverage. Apparently the long continuous stretch of rain stops when the jet stream straightens out. The atmosphere is looking more like a sponge than a series of rivers running over head. The extra rainfall in some areas of the world seems to be offset by extra dry conditions in other areas.
As the potential for increased rainfall increases, time will only tell if the rain coverage expands to drier areas or if it continues to drench the same areas again and again.
Ancient civilizations invested a lot of time and effort into collecting seasonal rainfalls and making sure they had enough water for their agricultural growing season. We appear to be thinking that what was done in the past is of no value to modern people who can use electricity to pump water out of great depths of the Earth whenever we feel like it. One of the problems are the artificial borders people have implemented on geographical formations that don't care who thinks they own them. In the end it is the land that owns us and the more we ignore that fact the harder it becomes to survive by doing things in spite of instead of alongside the natural energy flows.
For people, the worst possible case would have the increasingly heavier rains along the coasts push development inland away from the coasts. For the oceans that wouldn't be such a bad situation. There are probably 60,000 miles of coastline that use to naturally interact between the oceans and the land in a beneficial way for the entire planet. This interaction has been reduced to to the point of uselessness, changing an interactive zone of life into a dumping ground.
Dam collapse in Laos, leveling entire villageshttps://www.express.co.uk/news/world/...
Too early to know why it happened except that the rain was responsible. The dam has been under construction since 2013. It was being built to export power to another country.
Expanding hydro electric power is putting dams in places that have questionable rewards. Some of the geology in Asia are up to 12 mile thick beds of sediment built up over millions of years that can hide anything underneath them. The land looks stable under regular conditions. Weather conditions are not getting more stable. The thick deposits could have problems from both seismic events and atmospheric events.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2...
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https://www.miamiherald.com/news/stat...
Maybe insurance firms know something which the elected representatives would rather not deal with up front. Insurers and actuaries tend to go with the probable.
We have reached the point where the physical reality is visible to the naked eye. Long time coming but we finally arrived. When things are hypothetical it is very easy to have multiple viewpoints, especially conflicting viewpoints which can hide behind the inability to clearly perceive the situation. As the old expression says, money talks, in this case damages, as no one gets paid extra because something didn't fall down, and nonsense walks.
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Is it true all Florida is no more than six foot above sea level?
The highest elevation in the Florida Keys (southern most land) is 18 feet. Northern Florida and the western end of the Panhandle are around 300 feet. The highest point in Northern Fl is 345 feet, which is the lowest high point of all 50 states. The coastal areas are very low naturally. The elevations for central Fl are not popping out in web searches. Search for a map of highest elevations, that info comes up right away. Try for the rest of state, get hard to read maps, not much coming up easy to see. Not using the right words probably. You can get elevations by requesting each city. Miami, 5.5 million people, averages around 6 feet, not going over 40 feet. In other locations, such as inland along the length of the peninsula elevations of 100 feet is not uncommon. In some areas the highest elevation readings belong to buildings and other man made structures. In Florida, the value of housing located at higher elevations is increasing in value at a faster rate than housing at lower elevations.The real estate industry is still working the coastal areas as reasonable places to build. Quotes in this article basically say they'll believe when they see it.
http://www.gainesville.com/news/20161...
The problem with the we can take philosophy is that it all goes out the window when the storm surges roll in. It only works if there aren't any major storms with the wind blowing in the wrong direction. In the meantime, even Bill Gates is investing heavily in low lying coastal area developments. Bill Gates also has agricultural interests in northern Fl that make use of the free groundwater that is slowly disappearing.
http://www.gainesville.com/opinion/20...
The next big storm, big earthquake, big volcano, big fire or big heatwave is just another piece of news happening to some one else. So far it seems to be working. The problem is the list of items being added to the next big thing keeps growing.
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Clearly a coastal city is in the firing line as seas rise.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/wo...
We see Myanmar warning that the climate is changing around the world. In their own country, people are blaming deforestation for specific flooding.
The dam failure in Laos is compounded by the sweep of water downriver to the next country and city.
Lack of warning doesn't help. In this case, the Myanmar government put a message on a Facebook page - a day after the water had flooded the area. Myanmar is one of the poorest countries in the world so I don't know how many people would even be able to see Facebook - either the electronics would not be in their homes or the infrastructure would not exist to carry the signal. This also indicates that the government may not have its own website /flood warning dedicated website.
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