| For those in New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire, repeat these words: "Turn Around, Don't Drown."
Make them automatic, because as more roads flood and wash out from the additional 1 - 2" of rain expected to fall today, your life is in danger. A family in NH lost their 7 year old daughter when their car was caught in a flash flood yesterday.
Flash floods are expected in the Adirondacks, Northern Vermont and New Hampshire.
A flash flood is DIFFERENT from ordinary flooding. It's not the same thing as your basement filling with a few inches of water. Instead, rain falling upstream makes its way downstream all at once, causing sudden and dramatic rises in the water level. This is not a slow rise over the course of hours, but a rise of feet in the course of seconds or minutes.
If you see water flowing across the road from a river, brook, or stream, it could be deadly. Turn Around, Don't Drown.
There is also a mud slide warning.
For those who don't live in these states, join me after the fold for a discussion of what I now call "Weather 2.0," some of its implications, and something I want to try to do about it. |
| Weather 2.0 - it's the new weather, and it's coming to you!
The first release of a new version of software is generally a "public beta." It may have some interesting new features, but is often buggy - sometimes VERY buggy. You're getting software that really doesn't quite work, and that customer support doesn't quite know how to support....
That's what's happening with the new weather, Weather 2.0. Our energy usage over the last century has entitled us to a free, mandatory upgrade to the buggy public beta. Things aren't behaving quite they way they should be, and it doesn't seem to matter where you are.
Drought? Yup. Flood? Yup. Flooding during a drought? Yup, even that.
One of the most bizarre things in Vermont early this summer was a flood warning when the fire danger was "Severe." How did this happen? Well, we had just had an extended period of rain, from which the rivers hadn't receded entirely. In the mean time, we had several days of 90 - 100 degree weather without a cloud to be seen and persistent dry winds. Those winds are the key - they dried everything out like a planet-sized hair dryer on hot.
The rivers still hadn't settled down, the ground was still fairly damp, and then the thunder storms moved in with torrential rains. So with a severe fire danger from the dry air, we had a flood warning. Those early storms were all upstream from us and didn't hit where we were, but the flooding did - while the plants remained so dry they presented a fire danger.
Those storms turned out to be the kick-off event for one of the wettest, grayest Julys in history. Vermont usually gets about 4 feet of rain each year. This July, we got 2 feet. There were 17 days of rain. Nearly every day was cloudy.
August has decided to turn up the volume. We had one day with more than 5 inches of rain. Yesterday's day long thunderstorms were so severe that the weather reporter just said they had new tornado warnings popping up every 5 - 10 minutes. One town we drove through on our way out of town got 3/4" hail 7 minutes after we drove through. For people who live in flatter places, this is a good time to know that the mountains create turbulence that breaks up storms, preventing tornadoes from forming. Last week there was a tornado that ripped through New Hampshrie (remember what I just said about mountains?). It stayed on the ground for over an hour, leaving a 50 mile long trail of devastation.
There are storms moving through the region again today, and for the northern tier counties, rain and thunderstorms are predicted at least through Wednesday.
A couple of the things that are happening as a result of this weather:
- Some trees are turning color, due to the lack of sunlight. Their low-light trigger mechanism that's supposed to mean that autumn has arrived has been fooled into thinking it's here. In August.
- Pretty much any crop planted in the rich bottom-lands along the rivers, if not already dead, will not survive. Those planted uphill are often stunted. Tomatoes in some places are splitting from the excess moisture. One gardening friend is unable to weed his garden and pick his peas, because the ground is so wet he just sinks if he tries to walk in there. Also rust diseases are rampant, and he's afraid that he would spread it from diseased peas to healthy ones as he picks.
- Red pine trees are dying. I don't mean that a few look kinda sickly here and there. I mean the bark is cascading off the trees and they are dying very rapidly. Whole stands. It's happening everywhere I've driven in the last few weeks (and I've been through most of VT, NH, and eastern MA).
- Maple trees, beech trees, spruces, and others are dying, but a bit more slowly than the red pines. You can't drive anywhere (I drive too much) without seeing "skeleton trees" - standing dead trees without a single leaf or needle. Out of curiosity, on the highway yesterday, I did an informal unscientific visual survey using the mile markers to measure. There was an average of 1 skeleton tree every 1/10 of a mile.
- At our house, the storms have meant losing (again) our inverter to a direct lightning strike. It also meant we almost couldn't leave, because the road at the end of our driveway was in the process of washing out. It's not a flash-flood area, but the volume of fast-moving water running down the hill was eroding a gash in the road that I would not have been able to traverse in another 10 minutes. There was so much water moving so fast that, if we had a small enough raft, we could have gone white water rafting from the outlet of our little culvert.
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What to Do?
I know that the upgrade is not backward compatible. Once you've upgraded to Weather 2.0, there's no uninstall procedure to bring back Weather 1.0. But we CAN do things to patch Weather 2.0 and help it become a bit more stable.
We've all seen the lists of ways you can help the planet. But somehow having a bunch of lists available doesn't appear to be sufficiently motivating.
So what if we could work together all across the country to do one, small, concrete thing?
100,000 Windows
What if we had a nation-wide community service weekend this fall to put plastic wrap over 100,000 windows?
Why 100,000?
Because it's a nice round number, it's achievable, and it would keep 6 million pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
How hard would it be to achieve this goal? We'd need to cover 5 windows in 40 buildings in 4 communities in each state.
Doesn't sound so big, now, does it?
If ordinary Vermonters volunteering for 3 hours on annual "Greenup Day" each spring can collect 40,000 bags of trash, then volunteer crews around the country can easily tape up some plastic wrap on a few measly windows.
Heck, you don't even have to trudge down stream banks or haul trash bags. |
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