Pray for Nebraska. And Iowa. And South Dakota. The above picture was taken just south of our town on Friday, on US Highway 81.
The term "bomb cyclone" was used by the news media to describe what happened. I had thought it was a made-up term by Weather Channel for hype value. I still think that. But by whatever name you call it, it was one mean "perfect storm".
From this article in the Omaha World Herald:
From this article in the Omaha World Herald:
"An eerie, thick fog settled over Nebraska and Iowa on Tuesday...The fog was bringing an early warning: a powerful cyclone was arriving...In popular culture it’s known as bombogenesis, or a bomb cyclone, an epic drop in air pressure that triggers historic weather...By itself, the moisture-filled storm would not have dealt Nebraska the crippling blow that has occurred. Our harsh, late winter set the stage. When the two combined, they produced Nebraska’s worst flooding in 50 years and worst blizzard in nearly as many years."
"This storm can be considered historic,” said Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center. “This was a monster, no question about it.”
Carbin and other meteorologists say the storm’s genesis is well understood: It’s a seasonal phenomenon that draws its power from the volatile currents in the atmosphere as spring jostles with winter....As the bomb cyclone ensued, weather satellite images showed what appeared to be a land-based hurricane.
The 1- to 3-inch rainfall the storm delivered wasn’t extraordinary. But it fell on snow rich with water. In Omaha, several inches of snow remained on the ground, remnants of the 30 inches that had fallen since early February, itself a record-setting month for snow....Across eastern Nebraska, locked in that snow was 1 to 3 inches of water, according to the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center. Beneath that snow was frozen ground — unable to absorb the runoff. In a sense, eastern Nebraska was one big concrete parking lot, and the equivalent of a 2- to 6-inch rainfall was about to wash off it. As if that weren’t bad enough, there wasn’t the usual amount of room in eastern Nebraska’s rivers. They were already high as they continued to drain away last fall’s abundant rains."
"Multiple states were affected not only by flooding but by blizzards, deadly fog, damaging straight-line winds, even tornadoes. Nebraska and neighboring areas of South Dakota and Iowa were the hardest hit by flooding."
The article doesn't mention the ice jams, which were a primary cause of rivers overflowing their banks and acted as battering rams to bridges and roads.
This picture is the same general area as the first picture. It was taken today. So progress is being made. Our town is no longer an island, but we are still a peninsula.
This picture is the same general area as the first picture. It was taken today. So progress is being made. Our town is no longer an island, but we are still a peninsula.
We are thankful that none of our family has had their homes flooded, but are aware of the suffering of others, including at least three who lost their lives, and thousands of people who had to evacuate, not to mention farm and ranch animals that were lost.
I'll pray for these folks, Katherine. I'm wondering if these events will be more frequent in the future. I hope that future infrastructure development will reflect lessons learned from these terrible disasters. I think a lot can be learned from the Dutch in handling water extremes.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Stanley. Property can be replaced, lives not so much. Yeah, I hope those who are rebuilding infrastructure learn from other disasters. I am read some interesting things about what the Dutch are doing.
DeleteI also hope they don't abandon some good ideas from the past. There has been a fair amount of small scale hydroelectric power here, which has a favorable carbon footprint. Our town actually gets all or most of their electric power from a hydro plant. One of the things taken out by the floods was a 1930s era dam with hydroelectric turbines (not here). My guess is it won't be replaced because it won't be considered cost effective. But it was a clean power source.
Damming rivers also can drive a lot of ecosystem changes. I guess we have to balance all these factors.
DeleteSome of them aren't really dams. The one here is diverted into a canal, then routed back into the river. The fishermen around (I'm not one) talk of some monster catfish in the canal.
DeleteThanks for checking in, Katherine. Stay safe. We have thought about going to that landfill crane thing in Kearney, but not this year.
ReplyDeleteI've came were a big problem in the Grand River here. Played havoc with several municipalities nearby.
Another year you'll have to see the cranes. Kearney isn't the only place to see them, but they have a nice visitor center there.
DeleteI saw my first cranes of the season up here yesterday when we were surveying tornado damage nearby. One of Raber's co-workers lost her house, and the shop where he worked had some flooding. Tornado one day, and woke to an inch of snow the next. Never saw that before.
DeleteThe cranes used to be quite rare and shy, but now they favor nearby cornfields and the marshes by the freeway, and are pretty common.
I'm sorry to hear about the co-worker's house! This storm system spawned trouble all over the place.
DeleteStanley has hit on what should -- emphasize should -- come next. There was flooding like this 50 years ago (a history upon which deniers will seize), but there was less property to be destroyed. And 100-year events are coming closer than 100 years apart.
ReplyDeleteWe will continue to pray for you and your neighbors. But let us pray, also, for the nincompoops who have decided its a good idea to let oil exploration upset marine ecosystems in the Atlantic along the east coast to a point just north of, um, Mar-a-Lago. The idiocy in the mendacity and the overtness of all of it are breathtaking.
Glad you are safe, Katherine. So sad for those who have been impacted. Fires, floods, tornado, hurricanes, earthquakes - unfortunately, there are not too many places in the US that are free of the risk of a natural disaster. DC area is actually one of the least risky. But we do get the occasional tornado, the occasional flood, some fallout from hurricanes, and even the occasional earthquake. But, still pretty rare.
ReplyDeleteWe have been looking for a house on the Chesapeake Bay (actually, on one of the rivers that flow into it), to move from the suburbs to a quieter community on the water. We have become very aware of the flood plain issue, as so many of the homes we have looked at are built in a flood plain.
My husband doesn't want to mitigate the risk with flood insurance, so we keep looking.
The Potomac also floods pretty badly at times, but although it has damaged some of the islands in the river, and the paths along the river between the river and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (a national park area), I have never heard of it getting high enough to damage homes - they aren't built on the riverbanks here and the land isn't as flat. A flood several years ago did damage an upscale waterfront center in Georgetown with shops, restaurants, and $1 million condos a few years ago, because they didn't get the floodgate up in time. It was a manual operation, but it's now automated so that it doesn't happen again.
Be alert and stay safe!
Good luck with your house hunt. Yes, best to be wary of flood plains.
DeleteHas your trip to Australia happened yet?
Anne, Your husband is a smart man. I have flood insurance here, where I am not in a flood plain and the chance of being flooded is behind me -- Lake Okeechobee and the ancient, crumbling Herbert Hoover Dam that holds it back, rather than the Atlantic Ocean, which may some day wipe out the place madames go to get selfies with the movers and shakers of the Party of Family Values.
DeleteBut Congress is catching on. Only the feds will provide flood insurance. The insurance industry is too smart to fall for that, especially since the SCOTUS said people who get wiped out regularly on barrier islands have to be made whole regularly. So Congress has toughened up a little on price. Mine went $70 a year to $477 a couple of years ago when Congress noticed that they can't pay for all they cover. There are members who know that the program is still are actuarily insane. I suspect flood insurance will cover only a fraction of losses will simply go away after three years in a row of 100-year storms someplace.
Meanwhile, although the feds insure and the feds pay out, the feds have made themselves collect payments through your friendly local private agent, so there can be a public/private partnership -- all profits to the privates and all losses to the public -- and why am I not surprised?
Tom - I hope we get to meet sometime. I want to assess whether your biting wit in these comments, which I really enjoy (at least when you're not puncturing my cozy conservative bubble), is dished out in sort of a folksy, Will Rogers style, or if you go darker than that :-)
DeleteMy wife always tells me to shut up and pray.
DeleteThere is usually a lot of arm waving connected to my comments. BTW, a girl we spotted in one of my last years of being a scholarship judge, literature division, has just published her first book. Local acclaim, of course. We'll see what the critics make of it.
One should plus up the flood plain predictions when buying or building a house. We are now 1°C warmer which means, on average, the atmosphere has increased by 7% its capacity for water vapor. If you think of this as a shift in the bell shaped curve of rain events, 1-in-500 year events could become generational.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I don't like the term bombogenesis. I just hate the sound of it but now we're stuck with it. Perhaps meteorologists should consult literary people before developing these monikers.
"Bombogenesis", I don't like it either. Somebody just made it up.
DeleteKatherine, we leave in a week. We decided to break up the trip by flying to Hawaii, spending a night and flying Hawaiian the next day to Sydney. So it will be 10 hours to Honolulu, then sleep, then 10 hours to Sydney. Coming back, we stay a couple of days in Hawaii before heading home. Flying 26+ hours each way including layovers in California seemed too much. We are saving money on the Hawaiian flights RT HNL to SYD, and that is paying for the rest of it. Bottom line is about the same, but maybe less exhausting.
DeleteI think you should head to Hawaii again! But wait until after Easter and before summer vacations. Or maybe next year when it's cold in Nebraska again! The hotel prices are sky high there now because of spring break/Easter breaks!
Australia has also been dealing with a cycle of droughts and floods that are seriously impacting the farms and ranches there also. My son's tech start-up deals with farm/ranch management and we have been updated frequently about the situation there by following his company's FB page and blogs. They post news and videos.
More than 500,000 cattle have been killed by floods in just the Townsville area near Brisbane.
Anne, enjoy your trip! Isn't Australia headed into their autumn now? If so, it should be a nice time to visit. Definitely breaking your journey in Hawaii sounds good.
DeleteI'm sorry to hear about so many cattle being killed by floods. I guess everyone is dealing with climate disasters lately.
Are you you still OK, Katherine? Heard on the radio that more people had been evacuated today.
ReplyDeleteWe are still okay. The newly evacuated areas are east of us quite a ways. The Missouri River is at 34 feet, flood stage is considered 27 ft. Everything flows into it. Offut Air Force Base was flooded, a third of its structures were underwater. We heard today that an elderly woman who lived on a farm near here had died Thursday because the rescue workers had not been able to reach her in time.
DeleteYes, worry about elderly, sick, and livestock in these situations. Nevermind the intensive livestock manure lagoons that start washing into the.water table.
DeleteFloods can rise so fast. They used to dynamite ice dams here to open things up,and I have to wonder why they don't anymore.
Sometimes people won't leave their homes because they don't have anyplace to take their pets, and gamble that they can shelter in place and be okay. But things can change so quickly.
DeleteTom, we called about flood insurance for a house we are interested in that is in the 500 year flood plain. The quote was for $550/year. My husband won't even remotely consider a house in the 100 year flood plain. As he told the RE agent, "I am still a bit short of a 100 years old, and I have seen two "100 year" floods in my life so far."
ReplyDeleteI really like the house in the 500 year flood plain, so he called, but I can tell, he's still not comfortable with it. I doubt that we will buy it.
And we don't live in hurricane country like you do!
Anne, there is no place that's safe anymore. One of our sons lives in Los Angeles, and we call him about fires and mudslides more often than he calls us about hurricanes. Another lives in what used to be meterorlogically unchallenging Dallas and gets 100-year rain regularly.
DeleteThen there's us: "You can't have a blizzard, a flood, and a cyclone all on the same day!" Nebraska: "Hold my beer!"
DeletePA isn't bad so far except for more overcast and precipitation than usual. We had some single digit degree nights but no extended cold spells. We did have a weird outbreak of tornadoes last year but nothing more than an EF2. Of course, climate is still shifting, so who knows where we'll go from here? Luckily, I live in the Pocono mountains, some day to become the Pocono islands?
DeleteStanley, lucky you, the Poconos mountains sound beautiful.
DeleteStill pretty good, Katherine, despite the big box stores they built over the last 20 years. We have flood prone areas in East Stroudsburg, though, protected so far by a levee. I'm 700' above sea level and situated on a small ridge and have no problems so far. I had a nightmare once where I looked out my front door and saw nothing but box store parking lot as far as I could see.
DeleteMaybe time has accelerated for us, we're living longer, and the 100 year intervals just feel like they're happening every year. Could be because we're hurtling toward a black hole. Stanley, does time accelerate in the vicinity of a black hole? I read a Stephen Hawking book, but that a full month ago, so I've blissfully forgotten everything about physics in the interval. And no wonder: a month is now a hundred years, at least meteorologically speaking.
DeleteI'm no expert, Jim, but time slows near a black hole due to curvature of space-time. I know how Uncle Al came up with special relativity but understanding general relativity is still on my bucket list.
DeleteIn the movie "Interstellar", Matthew McConaughey's character lingers an extra hour (local time" on a planet near a massive black hole. He eventually returns to see his daughter on her deathbed at an advanced age.
DeleteStanley's ref to the McConaughey film reminds me that my students used to like this short movie about time/space travel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTtStKOnow8
DeleteYep. Strange but true. Nicely done short film.
DeleteOk - if time slows in the vicinity of a black hole, then maybe the fact that 100-year events happen every month now means that we're hurtling away from a black hole. That's a comfort, anyway.
DeleteTom, I was born in Los Angeles, and grew up there and in the mountains about 2 hours away from LA. One of my sons now lives 5 miles from where I lived until I was 10.
ReplyDeleteThe cycle of fire/flood/mudslide has been part of Calif living forever. And, of course, the occasional earthquake. My parents were born in LA in the first decade of the 20th century, and my paternal grandparents lived in LA from the 1880s. The cycles of drought, flood, fire, mud, etc has always been part of life in California. Along with the occasional earthquake. Nothing new.
We moved to the mountains when I was 10, and forest fires were a very real thing. The fire fighters do an amazing job, and most of the local firefighters were volunteers, including my brother and pretty much every other able-bodies male on the mountain (probably females nowadays also). The year before my high school 40th, there was a big forest fire, followed by winter rains and slides. When I went out that summer to go to the reunion at my mountaintop high school, the main highway was closed in part because they were still cleaning up from the mud and rock slides of the winter. I had to take detours through the back roads.
When I was an undergrad, I attended the Marymount part of what is now Loyola Marymount Univ in LA. I was in the last class to graduate from the all-women campus. They moved to Loyola's campus the following Sept. The college was on a cliff in an area called Palos Verdes, overlooking the ocean with a simply spectacular ocean and Catalina Island view. If you were to take Palos Verdes Drive past the school, and continue south, you might still see the sad, dead, once gorgeous homes that were built below the highway on the hills that rise directly from the ocean, with non-stop ocean views. Although I imagine what was left of the homes has probably been removed by now. The area is on a minor fault that comes off the San Andreas (which is farther east, inland), and there are regular, small movements there. The homes started sliding downhill towards the ocean, were condemned, and the state did not permit rebuilding. In Pacific Palisades, overlooking the ocean near Malibu, many multi-million $ homes also slid towards the ocean after storms. No rebuilding there either. I don't know if the PV homes are still there. If you visit your son, you could drive out to see The Wayfarer's Chapel - a glass chapel popular for weddings, and near where all the homes were condemned. At some point, there will be no insurance available, and no rebuilding allowed, for homes built in high flood, high fire, high earthquake risk areas, just as has been done in those areas of greater Los Angeles.
My former college campus is now theThe Salvation Army's West Coast Trainng Center - with a dozen homes built on the land now for their senior officers - homes that would sell in the millions if normal real estate. Solid ground there. My Christmas donations went elsewhere after the first time I saw the homes built there)
Wow. Et tu, Salvation Army?
DeleteNYT has an article about farmers already in trouble in danger of folding due to the flood.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/us/nebraska-floods.html
If this is a climate change thing, then food production difficulty in Nebraska, of all places, is a problem for us all.
The damming of large rivers may also be a problem working in tandem with climate change. Seems like there was criticism of the Army Corps of Engineers for over-engineering the dam and levee system along the Mississippi and pushing problems up- or downriver into formerly stable areas. That infrastructure is now crumbling, which might be an opportunity to re-think how much we want to try to control waterways.
DeleteAlso, preventing some routine flooding prevents the river from purging itself of some impurities and fertilizing surrounding areas.
Jean: That infrastructure is now crumbling, which might be an opportunity to re-think how much we want to try to control waterways.
DeleteWonder what happened to the campaign promise of fixing the crumbling infrastructure in the US? One of the few campaign pledges that would have gotten bi-partisan support.
Guess the money is needed to build a wall on the border instead.
Good points, but there is more than one side to it. More than two, actually. The dams were put there for reasons; flood control, irrigation, and electricity generation. And recreation, though lately that has become a tail that wags the dog. People are already griping about how full Lake McConaughy is, though it is nowhere near capacity. They like their nice white sandy beach in the summer. I don't blame them. But that was actually a side purpose.
DeleteCould we do dams and flood control smarter? Very likely. But is it a good idea to give them up entirely? We still need places to store water against drought. Which is still going to happen. We still need electricity that has the advantage of a low carbon footprint. We still need some protection against Mother Nature's rampages. Maybe smaller scale, sturdier infrastructure. And definitely rethinking building houses in flood plains.
I'm reminded of Paolo Soleri's Arcology concept of going vertical.
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
I wonder if could merge with the technology from
monolithic.com
The more this unfolds, the worse it looks to me. Katherine, I imagine you are several days ahead of me in toting up the miseries yet to come. I mean, I understood the problem of evacuating over roads that don't exist. It took awhile longer to realize that someone somehow has to decide where to rebuild since some things were where they probably shouldn't be but have been there so long people still rely on them to be there even while you are trying to put them somewhere else. It wasn't until yesterday that I realized food prices will be higher for everybody later this year.
DeleteAnd the higher food prices won't mean rich farmers; they will reflect more out-of-business farmers. What a mess.
Stanley, I read your NYT link. It's not often they notice us. We would rather be boring than newsworthy. The story is heartbreaking. And true. My family back home dodged a bullet. They are too far west for the flooding. But they are in the middle of calving season, and that could have been them. Very few small ranches and farms could absorb the kind of losses described in the NYT article. What will happen is that many of them will have to sell their land, and the ones buying it will be the big operators,and/or corporate farming interests. A lot of the new owners will be absentee landlords. Four multinational corporations already control the food industry to a large degree.
DeleteNaomi Klein calls it disaster capitalism. Natural disasters are opportunities for Big Money. Following any natural disaster, the vultures start to alight.
DeleteIt is true that there are "vultures" waiting to swoop in, buy businesses at a discount, get them back on their feet and then sell them at a profit. That "vulture" tag was put on Mitt Romney in 2012, perhaps to good political effect.
DeleteIf vultures could speak like humans, their spokes-vulture might reply that vulturism conveys social benefits, because vultures preserve businesses (presumably including small farms) that otherwise would cease operating; and they provide liquidity in the marketplace to buy and sell businesses (whether or not there is a disaster that leads to a distress sale). And although it would be impolitic of them to say so, they might add that the proprietors of small businesses, including farmers, knew, or should have known, that they were setting up shop in an area prone to unpredictable natural disasters that could wipe them out; when the known risk of a thing happening actually happens, should the proprietor who decided to take the risk also bear some of the responsibility for the loss? Are the McMansion owners that Anne described, perched on the sides of cliffs over the ocean, get bailed out when their homes start sliding into the Pacific? I confess that my sympathy for their plight isn't bottomless.
I don't know that farms that have been productive for generations while owned by families can be placed in the same category as McMansions foolishly placed on moving ground. Climate change is changing the game in Nebraska, part of the great breadbasket. Old ways of doing things will have to give way to new strategies for growing food and the type of food to grow. Science is already working on these. The federal government can help educate the farmers the way it did during the Dust Bowl years. It would be a shame if rentiers who never planted a seed or birthed a calf are the only ones to benefit. By the way, have you all noticed the sudden shrinkage of cereal boxes while the prices remain the same? Some of those boxes look like they should hold CD's. I don't suppose those extra profits are going to the farmers? Answer: I don't.
DeleteI have a lot less sympathy for the McMansions on the ocean cliffs than I do for people whose land has perhaps been in the family for over a hundred years (blame the homestead act). The ancestors who homesteaded the land likely didn't know about the 100 and 500 year flood plains.
DeleteIt is true that vulture capitalists have their legitimate roles to play, as do actual vultures who are going to have a feast with lots of carrion now. Doesn't mean that I like either one of them.
Stanley, good point that people are going to have to recalibrate how they do things, just as they did in the dust bowl days. I'm glad science is working on solutions, and believe governments, state and federal, can play a positive role in this.
DeleteKatherine, definitely more sympathy for those who have had the land for a century or more and may now lose it than for the millionaire homes in California that started sliding down the cliffs they should never have been built on in the first place. One can buy earthquake insurance in California, and I would always check out the earthquake hazard maps before I ever bought a home there, no matter how great the view!
ReplyDeleteAs I have mentioned many times, fire is one of California's always-there risks. Many years ago, a good bit of Bel Air Calif was hit by a major fire and dozens of homes burned to the ground. As happened last fall in Paradise, CA in a more rural area near Sacramento, the Red Cross set up emergency shelters for evacuees. Tragically about 80 people died in the Paradise (aka Camp) fire, and almost 14,000 homes were lost.
That area was particularly hazardous due to geographic conditions. Will rebuilding be allowed even though it was the worst fire for deaths and homes lost in California history? The Red Cross shelters were quickly filled.
Probably the town will be rebuilt. Should it be?
After the Bel Air fire, the Red Cross shelter had no customers. They had all checked into luxury hotels in LA. Last fall's fires also included parts of southern California, including Malibu, and a number of celebrities lost their homes. They too did not need the help of the Red Cross. Those homes will be rebuilt, just as the Bel Air homes were year ago.
How much risk should be permitted when it is taxpayers who do not live in those areas who foot a lot of the bills after a disaster?
Personally, having grown up in a forest fire prone area, I would never build in some of the most attractive areas of California. Out of control huge fires terrify me. I have seen them from around 2 miles away and that is closer than I ever want to be to a major western fire. The big fire before my 40th HS renunion got much closer to where people lived than any did when I was living there. A small community about 2 miles from where our home had been lost 350 homes in that fire, including the homes of some of my high school classmates. They understood the risk and accepted it. Perhaps that is the case for farmers in flood zones too.
The floods are devastating, but, so far at least, the human death count is low. Losing one person is too many, but it seems a bit easier to evacuate in the case of floods, and even hurricanes, than in earthquakes or tornadoes, which come with so little warning. Forest fires can catch and spread very, very fast, because of winds in California, and there is often little time to evacuate if it means windy, rural roads instead of highways.
I don't know the answer to handling/insuring those who live in high risk areas.
Big fires terrify me, also. I guess I am more afraid of fire than flooding. 2012 was a very dry year, and a section of pasture burned on my family's land. Fortunately no people or animals were hurt. They traced the fire to a boat that was being towed on the highway. There were worn bearings on the trailer and it threw sparks. I can barely remember as a small child when one of the last coal-burning trains threw a hot cinder and set a field of wheat stubble alight. The question of insurance is a hard one to work out, how much is enough?
Delete