Fire & Floods Continue
From CNN’s US page:
On the West Coast –800 fires in Northern California
SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) — In less than a day, an electrical storm unleashed nearly 8,000 lightning strikes that set more than 800 wildfires across Northern California, a rare example of “dry lightning” that brought little or no rain but plenty of sparks to the state’s parched forests and grasslands.
They are forecasting more dry lightning storms later in the week.
Along the Mississippi – another levee break as the earthen berms become over-saturated and flow away after weeks of pressure. The crest is moving slowly down the river, and the danger isn’t over until the river is down in its natural bed.
People are discovering that a flood system for a 100-year event is no good, as we have had 500-year events every 15 years.
8 comments
…what was so rare about this massive dry lightning event was that it came this time of year. Dry lightning isn’t particularly rare in NoCal and Orygun/Washington east of the Cascades, but it usually happens in August, not June.
I was just thinking the other night as I was headed home from work that a sure sign that summer is finally here was the convoy of 10 tractor-trailer rigs and assorted support vehicles and smaller utility trailers I met headed south on U.S. 97 on their way to set up a fire camp somewhere in NoCal…
One of the oddest things about living in San Diego county is that they didn’t have a thunderstorm the entire decade I lived there.
I was at the Defense Language in Monterey twice, and don’t remember a day that I didn’t take a jacket with me, and now they are having temperatures in the 90s.
Everything is happening earlier, and is more intense.
We currently have gale force winds. It’s very disconcerting when a solid double-brick house shakes in an area that never had winds like this before. The weather report said this is the warmest July ever recorded here, with the lowest rainfall.
Weather is screwed everywhere. *shrug*
I’m getting nervous about the fact that there isn’t even an area of interest in the Atlantic. The one storm we’ve had so far was really a piece of a storm that started in the Pacific and came East.
Weird.
As they used to say in old movies:
“It’s quiet out there.”
“Yep, too quiet…”
just before the bad guys attacked.
Rain, rain, go away! It’s raining again, and the 5 day forecast says T-Showers every day. I’m getting moldy. 😐
One of my garden projects this year was going to be a rain barrel. I’m put that off to the future. I think a mosquito abatement project would be more appropriate this year.
You’ll need top-minnows to keep them down. I can recommend the gambusia as a voracious eater of mosquito larvae.
Send rain. Here. Now. Tip the country…let the mid-West drain off over here to the left coast. We need it.
You would think that someone would have figured out how to do that, although we now know that filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases isn’t that way.