How Bad Will It Get
Via Dr. Jeff Masters, The National Weather Service in Jackson, Mississippi has up a site, Historic Mississippi River Flooding that provides pretty grim reading if you live anywhere near the Mississippi.
With all of the improvements since 1927, this year is on track to produce flood crests that are higher in some areas. The frontal system that produced the record number number of tornadoes, also produced record rainfall that is flowing into rivers with the melt from the record snowfall this winter.
This is, hopefully, a 500-year flood, and not an every-other-year-because-of-climate-change event.
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I am no expert, but as one who has experienced firsthand a lot of fairly destructive floods, this looks really bad to me. As for what is or is not a 500-year event, that’s changing unbelievably rapidly, isn’t it. Things I thought I’d see once in a lifetime, I see instead once every couple of years… and it’s not getting better.
My car is really old. One reason I don’t replace it is that year to year, I don’t know if it will end up in one of our all-too-common floods. So far I’ve been lucky. But I’d hate to be unlucky the year after I bought a shiny new vehicle.
They had bad floods in 1927, and again in 1937, but this is worse than either. They pulled the plugs during the 1937 event, and then made more changes. The level has dropped, but it is still going to top anything in the records.
It is one thing if this is going to be the baseline for a century or so, but after the 2004 hurricane season was followed by worse in 2005, you don’t know. Is this our new normal?
Hell, you might want to take the car payment and buy a jon boat, just to cover your bases. An inflatable would be more convenient, but not very practical with cats.
An inflatable would be more convenient, but not very practical with cats.
ROFL! You ought to see my camping air mattress. It’s one of those self-inflating things that will only self-inflate if you keep it stretched out. Like in a closet. Like in a closet that cats aren’t supposed to be able to get into. Like in a closet where somehow cats figure out how to open the door to it. Like in a closet where cats are looking for interesting things to claw.
My camping air mattress now sports a large assortment of patches :).
Sorry, that’s sorta off topic, but when the topic itself is sorta depressing, (shrug). A friend’s uncle lives in Melville. Said uncle is now on the way to Dallas, where my friend lives, because he looked at the 1927 flood, looked at the ring levee around Melville, and figured out that if that same amount of water comes down the Atchafalaya, which is possible when they operate the Morganza spillway, Melville and every other town along the Atchafalaya is going to be 20 feet underwater ring levee or not. The problem being that there isn’t as much swamp for the floodwaters to spread across today as there was in 1927, because all the silt that used to spread across the entirety of South Louisiana now gets trapped in the Atchafalaya Basin by the floodwalls on all sides of it and builds land there. Which is why the swamps outside the floodwalls are falling into the sea, but (shrug). The Corps of Engineers didn’t understand such things when they designed the Atchafalaya floodway.
Yet from looking at news reports, the mayors of these little towns haven’t yet called for evacuations, even though in many cases the roads out of the towns will flood long before the water tops the ring levees. The next few weeks are going to be interesting. In the Chinese sense of the word.
– Badtux the Web-footed Penguin
Long ago I owned a nice, large, comfy air mattress, for the times I was boarding musicians from out of town and needed an extra place to sleep in my tiny apartment.
Did I mention that was BEFORE I lived with cats? 😀
Before my father purchased his and Mom’s retirement trailer near Lake Livingston, he spent considerable time with a topo map determining where to buy so that they would not be flooded when the gates on the Trinity River dam were opened. He chose well: the place he chose was only a few miles from the dam, but it never flooded. However, after both of them were long since dead, the winds of Rita brought grief… when I sold the place, practically every pine tree on the lot was horizontal (at least a couple dozen of ’em). The trailer survived, but not much else made it through.
– Steve the trailer-trash-and-proud-of-it human
The problem with ring levees is if they get topped they inside becomes a swimming pool with extra sewage and no outlet. Nice idea in normal times, but times aren’t apt to ever be “normal” for decades.
As a child I spent many a wet day in the bayou thanks to “Cat”, who had a particular fondness for inflatables when she wasn’t busy killing something or chasing dogs.
Even if the Ohio River had had a normal year, the Mississippi was going to be extremely high. The flooding from the Ohio is making it the record it will be downstream no matter what the Corps does.