It's That Time of Year Again!!

Tell that to the people in Seattle. Look at all the pedestrians out there!! Hope nobody got hurt!

More Iowa flood pictures

Peggy's blog has some photos of the Iowa floodwaters on the Cedar River south of Mt. Vernon, where we used to live.

The bridge at Sutliff that she features has its own website, too.

She also refers to her friend Tom's blog that in turn cites a blog in the Boston Globe's website. Boston.com's blog, "The Big Picture," has collected some of the best photos yet of the flood in Cedar Rapids.

i wanted to scan a photo i have of peggy with the famous sunburn, but while i can see it very clearly in my mind's eye, i can't find it. i think i'm gonna hire one of those clutterbuster people to come and organize all my photos! that'd be worth the $500 or so it'll cost.

"Under Water" by Digby

Here's a great post by Digby on the flooding in Iowa:

Under Water

by digby

The media are busy eulogizing one of the their own,* so they don't have time for this, but Jesus Christ:

Rising water from the Cedar River forced the evacuation of a downtown hospital Friday after residents of more than 3,000 homes fled for higher ground. A railroad bridge collapsed, and 400 city blocks were under water.

In Des Moines, 100 miles to the southwest, officials issued a voluntary evacuation order for much of downtown and other areas bordering the Des Moines River. Mayor Frank Cownie said the evacuations were an attempt "to err on the side of citizens and residents."

Des Moines is Iowa's capital and largest city, with about 190,000 residents. But the hardest-hit was Cedar Rapids, a city of 124,000 people.

Gov. Chet Culver declared 83 of the state's 99 counties to be state disaster areas, and nine rivers were at or above historic flood levels. Elsewhere in the upper Midwest, rivers and streams tipping their banks forced evacuations, closed roads, and even threatened drinking water.



And get a load of this:


Dave Koch, a spokesman for the Cedar Rapids fire department, said the river will crest Friday at about 31.8 feet. It was at 30.9 feet early in the morning. In a 1993 flood, considered the worst flood in recent history, it was at 19.27 feet.

The weather conditions that triggered the floods were the same as those in 1993: hot air from a ridge of high pressure on the East Coast colliding with cooler air from the West Coast, according to Ken Kunkel, interim director of the Illinois Water Survey.



Far be it for me to bring up the Obalglay Armingway, but this seems really bad.

Good luck to all you midwesterners affected out there. Yikes.


*I'm not being flippant. It's really hit the media hard and they all need to talk about it on the air. Other stories will have to wait for another day.

We interrupt the fun....

News of the massive flooding in Iowa is heartbreaking. Downtown Cedar Rapids is under water, with more water flowing in from the northern parts of the state, and the rain still coming down. Watch for the Dairy Queen on the AP video clip to the right....

Tom is fine....so far, he's high and dry in Mt. Vernon, which is 17 miles east of Cedar Rapids and two or three miles north of the Cedar River. (On the banks of which, by the way, Swine Boulevard and Madison Avenue are flooded...what IS the name of that little hamlet? Sutliffe?)

Deb's brother John and family are fine, but the business is not.

In Iowa City:

The buildings in the north part of the campus--the art museum, Hancher, etc.--are closed. All the art has been moved to a safe place.

The buildings in the south part of the campus, including *sob!* the library and English Philosophy Building, have been closed.

The Coralville Reservoir has gone over the top (yesterday or even the day before), and the Coralville Strip is flooded.

The IC DQ is fighting for its life.

Oops!

Raised the shade on the kitchen window this morning and saw this! Reminds me of the old poem--forget who wrote it.

How I luff der vinter season!
Brings us ski und schnee und schneezin!

The Lenten fast used to end precisely at noon on this day when I was growing up. What my parents ate, I don't know. They were kind of old school...which means there was no wild gorging at 12:01 because it was still officially Lent. Doubtless the fast ended at noon on Easter Saturday so the priests would not faint from hunger during the Easter Vigil service.

Why I Don't Live in Iowa Anymore.....

Click on the link, and you'll see IDOT photos of one of Iowa's recent blizzards (maybe the one I looked up in the Cedar Rapids Gazette?). Gack!

(Thanx and a tip o' the old seed cap to Erda, one of Iowa's great gardeners)

http://www.iowadot.gov/2007_blizzard.html

Wind Chill

Here's a chart from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
NOTE: click on the chart if it's not fully displayed in your window on this post.

We never heard of wind chill back when I was growing up in Fargo, ND, and the temps were often waaay below zero. Since Fargo is the windiest spot in ND (even windier than Grand Forks!, which is 80 miles north of Fargo), the wind chill numbers would have driven everyone away. The average wind speed in Fargo year-round is about 12 mph. So--and pardon my creaky math (Ha. All my brothers with the possible exception of John were geniuses in math and wound up as engineers...I was a writer...John turned out to be a doctor)--in theory if the air temperature on any given day in January was -2F, and the wind was puffing away at 12 mph, the wind chill would be somewhere around -16F to - 19F!! I think. I just remember the way Judy Henning and I figured out to tell if it was colder than -20F when we walked to school in the a.m.: the outsides of our legs would get stiff. When we got to school, we had to go through a few minutes or hours of pain while our legs warmed up! Sting and burn!

It's Snowing!!!

The first snowfall of 2007 started this afternoon sometime around 12:30 p.m. Cathy and I were both working on books in my den, when Cathy got up to get a cup of tea and said "Look!"

She pointed out the window, and sure enough....tiny little flakes were falling fast and had already covered the cars and tree branches out back. The flakes are bigger now at quarter to six and still falling. They look so beautiful drifting past the amber-colored street light at the end of our property. Of course, both of my cameras would be disabled! I took this photo with Cathy's, but she's gone home now.

The first snowfall has always been a miraculous event: the stealthy arrival--even if snow has been predicted, it's still a surprise. One minute the sky is leaden and grey, and the next, white flakes are sifting down. I love the soft blanket covering the earth as it rests, the whiteness and brightness. I remember my mother's excitement every year when the first snow started to fall in Fargo, N.D. (often around Halloween). So much of my love for nature comes from mom's calling my attention to natural beauty whenever we walked to the grocery store or to church or to school.

Like the inner 4th graders we really are, both Cathy and I (and I'm sure 100% of our coworkers) will be huddled around the TV tomorrow morning watching the school closings and hoping against hope there will be enough snow in DC that they will close the schools. Snow days are a gift, pure and simple, to those of us who love to stay at home on snowy days and color or read or make popcorn or take a nap and get paid for it to boot.

[Note to the Little Red Hen....it's colder here right now than in NYC or Minneapolis!]

Minnesota, weather or not.....

Winter is finally here. All the flowers that were blossoming here just ten days ago (see above) are now frozen solid, and there are no more little insects flying around in the beams from our security lights at night. I, for one, am relieved. After 70 years on this planet, most of them in the Midwest, my cells hanker for cold weather--maybe not quite as cold as in Minnesota, but cold enough to require an honest-to-goodness coat, gloves, and even a hat.

However, cold as it has been this past week, things are changing. A friend in NYC was expressing her wonderment at finding her town colder than Minneapolis the other day. That's something to think about. Minneapolis-St. Paul is the coldest major metropolitan area in the U.S. and one of the coldest large metropolitan areas in the entire world.

After reading my NYC friend's email, I thought about living in Minneapolis. I remembered that I used to take great comfort in the fact that there were only about 12 or so days per year when the temperatures were lower than -20. One solid week of severe cold weather would eat up seven of the 12, and it always comforted me to know there would be only five more left if it was a normal winter. (And yes, my cells did not like all that cold, but we got used to it.)

Minnesota, because it's a crossroads of three major continental biomes, may serve as a kind of canary in the coal mine for global warming. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has a newsletter for their volunteers, and back in the January/February 2001 issue, they ran a fascinatingly informative article, "The Crossroads of Climate Change," about just this.



http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/volunteer/janfeb01/warming.html

2001 is now six years ago....before Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" but after G.W. Bush's refusal to sign the Kyoto agreement. Six years ago, scientists and naturalists in Minnesota had a specific vision of what could happen if we the people do nothing to curb our carbon emissions. I shudder to think what they'd say now after six years of foot dragging and denial from our leaders and from most of us, too.

And sure enough, the Washington Post had an article last week on climate change: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/19/AR2006121901769.html

In it, the curator of the U.S. Botanical Garden said "Washington is the new North Carolina." A University of Minnesota regents professor is quoted at the beginning of the Minnesota DNR article as saying, "If I wanted to live in Nebraska, I'd move there." I feel the same way about North Carolina. Washington would not look half as beautiful if it were covered with kudzu.

Here's another quote from that article, and remember, this was written six years ago:

Reducing emissions is "not about giving up your car," says Michael Noble, director of Minnesotans for an Energy-Efficient Economy. Instead, he says, it's about galvanizing public demand to put energy-efficient technology into use now. Just as the world has embraced information technology--cell phones, personal computers, the Internet--in the past 15 years, so can people transform the use of energy technology, he says. "It's not a mystery how to fix this problem," says Noble. "Every change in energy technology has led to an improvement in the quality of life--wood to coal, coal to gas . . . now to solar cells, wind turbines, fuel cells."

Research ecologist John Pastor insists that people need to view both the causes and consequences of warming in personal terms. How we use our land, cities, and highways affects the climate as surely as the climate affects us. If we drive fuel-efficient cars and reduce our annual mileage, for example, we keep tons of carbon out of the atmosphere.

Though we must continue to investigate the impacts of warming, Pastor says, we cannot afford to wait any longer before we act. "Once we see broad-scale changes happening in vegetation," he says, "it's too late." Natural systems will collapse.

Humans might be able to adapt to new habitat in a warmer world, but what are we willing to give up? At risk is our natural heritage, Pastor says, our sense of place. And we could lose that identity soon. While they skied together near their home in Duluth, Pastor's college-age son asked him to estimate the speed of change. Pastor calculated a possible time line based on his own age of 48. "I'll live out the rest of my life in these north woods I love. You will not," he told his son. "By the time you die, this is not going to be here. Your children--my grandchildren--will only live a small part of their lives here. And my great-grandchildren probably will not see this at all."