The Weather Outside … Sucks
Take a look at the Weather Underground’s local calendar view for July, 2012. You will note that you only see the sun icon on 3 of the 31 days. I did exaggerate a bit about all of the rest having thunderstorms, as there were a few days when it was just rain without all of the flashing and booming.
This morning we had the entire show. Twice the lightning was close enough to suck all of the juice out of the wires and leave me on the batteries. The main road was a mess because they are resurfacing it and have the storm drains covered to keep out debris. I assume the stores on the road will want the town to post it as a no wake zone until the road work is done.
Meanwhile, the hurricane season has restarted with Invest 99, a wave that moved off of Africa and is headed West through the MDR [Atlantic Main Development Region defined as 80W-20W, 10N-20N] towards the Antilles.
12 comments
No wake zone? Driving slowly through the heavy run off so you don’t splash water into the stores? (Or not to wake up people as their houses float away? Not to have riotous funeral parties?….)
Are you in danger of sinkholes where you live, Bryan? The thought that Florida has huge areas of limestone deposits that are slowly eroding away underneath houses freaks me out….
“No wake zones’ are areas on waterways where morons have built so close to the water that if a boat basses at much above idle, the wake of its passing will flood the house. The same situation applies along a few major roads in the area, as the once generous set-backs have been sacrificed to road widening, and when the storm drains are plugged, the wakes caused by cars flow right in.
It is over on the peninsula that they have the limestome. and sink holes. Up here we have quartz sand and red clay in layers. When they tap the underground water for all of the people who have moved in they weaken the structure of the ground underneath them buy opening up caverns and causing waterflow that further erodes the limestone.
/marks off Florida as a place to visit….
So, when the sea level rises, there will be a lot of retirees and rich people whose idiot decision to build right at the water’s edge will come back and bite them…. And they’ll sue the builders, the cities, and the state.. and the federal government for good measure.
Kinda like in Malibu out here in Southern Cal. The elites’ houses are either falling into the ocean in our yearly mud flow season or going up in flames in our yearly fire season because they insist on building on the cliff’s edge for the view or in the heavy vegetation covered hills because of the quiet and isolation. Then they are so surprised when they come home to a new cliff or a pile of ash…. and then demand city/state/federal help.
If they would acknowledge that living in such areas does come with some dangers, and get the required insurance… like the earthquake insurance we have available in California, it might help. But to ignore the dangers and then be surprised when the inevitable happens is arrogant and tiresome.
Are you able to even buy hurricane/sinkhole insurance in Florida? And can you even stop the flood of people coming into the state? Maybe by more stories of alligator/crocodile/Burmese python v human altercations…
You tell people and they ignore you. The reason they could build near the water is because the only thing the old-timers built there were fishing shacks. You knew that anything built near the water was going to be destroyed by a hurricane, so you didn’t put anything permanent there. The old ‘waterfront’ houses were all built on bluffs back from the water and there are still houses on those bluffs that are more than 70-80 years old. If you replace one of those places you will discover that the bluffs are where the Native Americans lived for thousands of years. It is normal to find chert points and stone tools anywhere down here on the edge of bluffs over any waterway.
You can get wind insurance, but it isn’t cheap. You really need flood insurance, because water causes most of the damage, especially the storm surge.
If you buy a condo on the first floor of any major project on the barrier islands, you can’t get any kind of insurance. To protect the entire structure, the first floor is designed to blow out and allow the storm surge through. Originally most of the first floors were used as parking, and didn’t have walls, only support columns, but the developers got greedy. Somewhere is the sales agreement is the bad news about what will happen in a storm, but people don’t seem to care.
Unemployment has cause some out-migration, so the population isn’t really growing anymore. There are still too many people for the available resources and the infrastructure.
It isn’t just Mailibu, the same stupidity is on display all over San Diego county. The clowns on the edge of canyons can have their houses launched by an earthquake, or burned by fire racing up the canyon wall. If there is a fire in a canyon, some houses may have their foundations weakened by all of the water used to fight the fire. It is just a stupid place to build a house. If people want a view of the canyon, it would be cheaper and safer to install an HD camera on the edge, a large screen television on one wall, and connect them with a mile of cable. You could pan and zoom from your recliner.
I don’t think you can get insurance that covers sinkholes. Like flood insurance, it would probably require the Federal government to get involved and run the program.
You speak the truth about San Diego… and then I’d have to include myself: stupid enough to live in earthquake country. I like your idea about HD cameras… we could all live in North Dakota and pretend we’re in California and Florida… no earthquakes, hurricanes, mudflows or sinkholes…
I lived in Alaska and San Diego, but didn’t get overly nervous about it because I was living and working in solid, newer buildings on flat land. I wasn’t in danger of sliding into a canyon hundreds of feet below. I had to attend parties [for business reasons] at houses that were in exactly that danger, including one I saw as it was being built, and could see without using an instrument, that the house was not ‘square’, i.e. the horizontal surfaces weren’t level, and the walls weren’t plumb. I met the owners on a trip a decade after I left San Diego. They were in a new house. He told me he should have listened to me, because the house was a disaster – the doors and windows wouldn’t open and close properly, and there was structural damage after a minor quake. Of course the rear deck projected over the edge of the canyon. The house was torn down when it was 6 years old, and there were some nasty lawsuits, and investigations of building inspectors. That is the sort of thing that makes it really scary.
Uh, you have never been to North Dakota, have you? Beautiful country … in the warm months. Minot AFB is in North Dakota. If you mess up in Alaska, they send you to Minot.
I have seen most of the world, and there is no perfect place. You’re better off appreciating what you have, because I can assure you, there are always worse places to live.
I’m thinking of buying a shack in the redwoods — look at your Bing or Google Maps for Boulder Creek, CA, though you can’t see much of it between the hundred-foot-tall redwood trees, look at Google Earth at some of the addresses I’m looking at and all you see is green treetops. That said, I have no illusions that my shack would survive an earthquake or a major fire. Which is another reason to virtualize as much of my life as possible — it’s a lot easier to stash a backup disk with my books and music somewhere else that might survive, than to rebuild a (physical) collection of music and books. My main computer is now a laptop, so fire comes near, well, grab my laptop and my “go” bag with a few clothes and go, no biggie.
This duplex I’m currently living in won’t survive an earthquake either, it predates modern earthquake codes. That said, the apartment I was living in the last time we had an earthquake was built to modern earthquake standards and it was still swaying back and forth like a downer cow when the Calaveras Earthquake hit (which was a rather mild 5.6 quake), and half the drywall was cracked afterwards as well as the bathroom vanity (luckily they *did* have the required flexible segments in all the piping so none of the plumbing or drains sprung a leak). So (shrug).
*sigh*… /scratches off North Dakota and Boulder Creek….
Everything goes to dust in the end, Ellroon. Nothing is permanent. Even the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China will be nowhere in a few million years, eroded to dust, lost to time.
Impermanence is the rule, not the exception. Just sayin’.
They place I’m currently living has survived numerous hurricanes, but it will be under water in a few decades because people refuse to believe reality and take the necessary actions to stop climate change.
There is no force in the universe that can overcome human stupidity.
“There is no force in the universe that can overcome human stupidity.” Bryan Dumka.
Now this is the perfect quote that describes our first two decades into this new century….
We’re truly f**ked, aren’t we….
As you have been reporting, we have radioactive waste from a Japanese nuclear meltdown washing up along the West Coast. A huge gyre of plastic crap in the North Pacific. A factory food industry and China trying to poison us. I’m getting daily rain in what should be a dry month while the middle of the country is in a hard drought. The Mississippi River has gone from trying to wash away Louisiana to too low for barges to float in no time.
Things are truly screwed up, and no one with any real power has the intelligence or courage to actually do anything about it. All we get from ‘the smartest people in the room’ are lies and evasions. [note that there is no reporting on the IQ of the other people in the room. It might be in a day care center for all people know.]
Yes, Ellroon, as Badtux says: WASF…