When Floods Arrive
Floods . . . It is an awful event when it will not stop raining. It's worse when you live downhill from the water in the flood plain. And sometimes you don't even see the rain that has brought flooding to your place. We see here a real photo postcard of a flooded downtown at the bottom of some hills in the northern Midwest. The date is August 7, 1935 at Gays Mills, Wisconsin. The water looks about a foot deep, and though it looks like a disaster, it's not really so bad. And, clearly, this amount of water is not close to what has been seen recently in Boulder County, Colorado where I used to reside.The weather seems to be intensifying. You may notice that certain weather tendencies in your area are growing more intense or will if the conditions we see now continue. If you experience lots of thunderstorms in the summers, they appear to be growing larger and carry more water; such as they recent gully washers up here in the Okanagan Valley this month. If you live in an area with high winds, these windstorms will likely increase in speed and duration. No one predicted the confluence of forces or weather patterns in the stalled storm at the mountains’ edge as seen this past week in the Front Range of the Rockies. This storm was of the greatest intensity and the longest duration yet. Look what damage happened without any dams breaking, especially in and around the areas recovering from forest fires. Our hearts go out to our old friends and neighbors and their friends and neighbors.We have always recorded disasters, while they are going on, and the aftermaths. We are fascinated, appalled and frightened by nature's fury. The photos made in the 1930s look very much like the disaster shots of today. But with so many more people on the planet, and the environmental degradation accelerating, humans will be adding many more photos to this genre month by month.This flood in Wisconsin looks small, but it wasn't the Johnstown flood, not nearly. And some day the floods of 2013 in Colorado may look small. But let's hope not.