What Climate Change?
The Palm Beach Post reports that all of the smoke along the “Treasure Coast” is due to Lake Okeechobee burning. The level of the lake is down and two fires of suspicious origin have merged into a single large fire involving approximately 3500 acres of lake bottom. The fire is being limited by the dykes that would keep water in, if there were any water.
What the area really needs is something like a tropical storm to refill the lake and reduce stress on the watershed, but hoping for a tropical storm is not a universally acceptable solution.
7 comments
things aren’t good when the bottom of the lake is on fire.
I know I felt guilty all last summer wishing for a good tropical storm. I think it was Francisco or something like that dumped so much rain on us here in Georgia. It stalled and reversed a couple of times…except for the flooding and floating coffins it was great.
Last year it was the Okefenokee Swamp, and this year a lake because the rain patterns have changed.
Well, this is a La Niña year, Fallenmonk, so you make see a tropical storm. The Chattahoochee / Apalachicola river system could use the water.
You gotta be grateful to those dykes. 😈
About 30 years ago, a member of our musical group was always talking about the time the Cuyahoga River burned in 1969 during his school days at Oberlin Conservatory. It wasn’t the first time the Cuyahoga burned. I have to say, though, the notion of a lake bottom on fire is even scarier.
This isn’t a minor lake, Okeechobee is the large “hole” in the center of South Florida on all the maps. People have been pulling water out for agriculture and new developments, so it was already under stress.
It is also part of the navigable water system across the Peninsula, so low water levels also affect moving bulk merchandise on barges.
OT, have you noticed that John Amato of Crooks and Liars has all but borrowed your blog slogan? Or has it always been that way, and I’m just now noticing?
That’s a meme that has been around for a while, at least a couple of years, as the result of one of the “blogger v ‘journalist'” wars. I think is started over credentials for the 2006 campaign.
I make no claim to having originated it and would guess it arose in comments at Atrios’ place. I use to hang out over there until someone used the e-mail addresses for spam.